Research on several Indo-European languages attests to notable difficulties in inflecting irregular nouns and verbs. In these languages morphological and phonological factors are often intertwined in a way that obscures the source of the problem. Hebrew by contrast allows isolation of morphological and phonological factors in nominal inflection. Three experiments demonstrated that as in Indo-European languages, nominal inflection of Hebrew irregular nouns is slower than that of regular nouns and involves more errors. The occurrence of phonological alterations to the noun’s stem with the inflection is an additional source of irregularity, which also taxes the inflectional process in reaction time and error rate. The empirical results underline the power of the default automatic suffixation process as the main obstacle to irregular inflection. A theoretical contribution of this study is an interpretation of the irregularity effect based on a morphological analysis that views Hebrew as having a linear rather than a non-linear morphology. The stem–suffix match is suggested as the dominant factor affecting the inflectional process, responsible for the difficulties in irregular inflections. It is argued that in Hebrew, the differences between inflecting regular and irregular nouns can be easily and adequately explained as resulting from a mismatch between a stem and an affix.
Asadi, Ibrahim A., Vered Vaknin‑Nusbaum & Haitham Taha
2023. The Role of Morphological Decomposition in Reading Complex Words in Arabic in Elementary School Years. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 52:6 ► pp. 2863 ff.
Boudelaa, Sami
2014. Is the Arabic Mental Lexicon Morpheme-Based or Stem-Based? Implications for Spoken and Written Word Recognition. In Handbook of Arabic Literacy [Literacy Studies, 9], ► pp. 31 ff.
Boudelaa, Sami & William D. Marslen-Wilson
2015. Structure, form, and meaning in the mental lexicon: evidence from Arabic. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 30:8 ► pp. 955 ff.
Farhy, Yael & João Veríssimo
2019. Semantic Effects in Morphological Priming: The Case of Hebrew Stems. Language and Speech 62:4 ► pp. 737 ff.
Farhy, Yael, João Veríssimo & Harald Clahsen
2018. Universal and particular in morphological processing: Evidence from Hebrew. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 71:5 ► pp. 1125 ff.
Güldenoğlu, Birkan, Tevhide Kargın, Hilal Gengeç & Mehmet Gürbüz
2019. Okuma Sürecinde Dil Temelli Becerilerin Önemi: Dil – Okuma İlişkisine Yönelik Bulgular. Turkish Journal of Special Education 1:2019-V1-I1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Klemer, Anat & Vered Vaknin-Nusbaum
2023. The Relationships Between Linguistic Literacy and Geometric Thinking in 2nd-Graders. Journal of Research in Childhood Education► pp. 1 ff.
Miller, Paul, Batel Liran-Hazan & Vered Vaknin
2016. Morphological Decomposition in Reading Hebrew Homographs. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 45:3 ► pp. 717 ff.
Nemeth, Dezso, Karolina Janacsek, Zsolt Turi, Agnes Lukacs, Don Peckham, Szilvia Szanka, Dorottya Gazso, Noemi Lovassy, Michael T. Ullman & Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells
2015. The Production of Nominal and Verbal Inflection in an Agglutinative Language: Evidence from Hungarian. PLOS ONE 10:3 ► pp. e0119003 ff.
Nevo, Einat
2024. The Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Low SES Kindergarteners’ Language Abilities. Early Childhood Education Journal 52:3 ► pp. 459 ff.
Prior, Anat & Eilat Markus
2014. Morphological activation in sentence context: when the root prevails over the meaning. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 29:9 ► pp. 1180 ff.
VAKNIN-NUSBAUM, VERED
2018. Morphological awareness and reading abilities in second- and third-grade Hebrew readers. Applied Psycholinguistics 39:5 ► pp. 989 ff.
Vaknin‐Nusbaum, Vered
2021. Morphological Awareness: A Tool to Promote Reading Fluency and Accuracy in Hebrew in Students with Reading Disabilities. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice 36:1 ► pp. 26 ff.
Vaknin-Nusbaum, Vered & Michal Raveh
2019. Cultivating morphological awareness improves reading skills in fifth-grade Hebrew readers. The Journal of Educational Research 112:3 ► pp. 357 ff.
Vaknin-Nusbaum, Vered & Elinor Saiegh-Haddad
2020. The contribution of morphological awareness to reading comprehension in Arabic-speaking second graders. Reading and Writing 33:10 ► pp. 2413 ff.
Vaknin-Nusbaum, Vered, Miri Sarid & Joseph Shimron
2016. Morphological awareness and reading in second and fifth grade: evidence from Hebrew. Reading and Writing 29:2 ► pp. 229 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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