Published August 23, 2025 | Version v1
Book chapter Open

No priming for Maltese word patterns in spoken word recognition

Authors/Creators

  • 1. University of Arizona
  • 2. ROR icon University of Malta
  • 3. ROR icon Dartmouth College

Description

As a Semitic language, Maltese exhibits root-and-pattern morphology, thus raising the question of whether roots and patterns provide cues that native speakers can exploit during word recognition. In this chapter, we focus on whether the pattern provides native speakers with cues that can facilitate spoken word recognition as has been previously found for visual word recognition (Galea 2011). We present a priming experiment designed to test whether the vocalic melody, prosodic CV structure, and the combination of these elements facilitates response times to auditorily presented target words, using the same auditory masked priming technique previously used for Maltese by Ussishkin et al. (2015). We find no such facilitation, thereby supporting models in which the pattern is not decomposed in the earliest stages of lexical access.

Files

979-8-90046-073-4_06-Ussishkin.pdf

Files (305.0 kB)

Name Size Download all
md5:229a3640996fc4fd2a45e3ccd90da7aa
305.0 kB Preview Download

Additional details

Related works

Is part of
10.5281/zenodo.16893678 (DOI)