Accessing Deverbal Nouns in L1 and L2 Arabic: A Masked-Priming Experiment

The current study examines how non-native speakers process deverbal nouns of Arabic. Unlike Indo-European languages, the word-formation process in Arabic occurs in a discontinuous manner. The root morpheme (carrying the core semantic information) interlocks in the word pattern morpheme (which holds the phonological and morpho-syntactic information). Research on Arabic shows that Arabic native speakers decompose derived and inflected (deverbal nouns and verbs) complex words during lexical processing. Priming studies on word processing did not appear to have consistent findings on whether L2 speakers decompose or fully list the complex forms; Using a masked-priming experiment, this study examined whether native and non-native speakers of Arabic decompose derived words, particularly, deverbal nouns in real-time. We tested a group of L1 Turkish /L2 Arabic learners and L1 Arabic speakers on six experimental conditions in which the relationship between prime and target is either morphological, orthographic, or semantic. The results indicated priming effects in the morphological conditions for native speakers, but not for non-native speakers. This shows that native speakers decompose deverbal nouns into their word patterns and root morphemes whereas non-native speakers list them as whole forms during online processing. These findings support the claim that L1 and L2 use different strategies in real-time processing of derived words.