Perea, M. 1 , Abu Mallouh, R. 2 , Moret-Tatay, C. 1, 3 & Carreiras, M. 2, 4
1 Universitat de València, Valencia, Spain
2 Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL). Donostia. Spain
3 Universidad Católica de Valencia, Valencia, Spain
4 IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Spain
Do Semitic and Indo-European languages differ at a qualitative level? Recently, it has been claimed that lexical space in Semitic languages (e.g., Hebrew, Arabic) is mainly determined by morphological constraints while lexical space in Indo-European languages is more affected by orthographic constraints (Frost et al., 2005, JEP:LMC). One of the key findings supporting this statement is the absence of masked form priming in Semitic languages. However, there is always some nonsignificant trend in the experiments. Here we present two masked priming experiments that examined whether masked form priming occur in a Semitic language (Arabic) in absence of one of the root letters. Specifically, one of the letters from the root was missing in the prime stimuli, either because it had been replaced by another letter (e.g., *Alb-TAlb; the root is T.l.b; Experiment 1) or because it had been removed (e.g., Alb-TAlb; Experiment 2). Results showed a significant masked form priming effect (around 16-19 ms), which is similar in magnitude to prior studies in Indo-European languages. Thus, the present data suggest that Semitic and Indo-European may differ more at a quantitative than at a qualitative level.