Masked cognate translation priming with Arabic-English bilinguals: Further support for the morphological account

Alhassan Alzahrani

doi:10.29038/eejpl.2024.11.1.alz

Authors

Alhassan Alzahrani Al-Baha University, Saudi Arabia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.29038/eejpl.2024.11.1.alz

Keywords:

cognates , non-concatenative, morphology, bilinguals

Abstract

The aim of this study is to test the two accounts that have been posited as how cognates are represented in the bilingual mind: the mophological account and the phonological account. More specifically, this study exploits the uique feature of pluralization in Arabic (i.e., concatenative vs. non-concatenative process of pluralization) to invetigate how cognates are represented in the bilingual mind of different-script bilinguals (Arabic-English bilinguals) using the masked priming technique. Two types of cognates were used: cognates that are pluralized concatenatively and cognates that pluralized non-concatenatively in Arabic. In concatenative pluralization, the phonology of the singualr form is intact such as هرمون /hormōn/ (hormone in English), which is pluralized as هرمونات/hormōnat/ (hormones in English). On the other hand, in non-concatenative pluralization, the phonology of the singular form is broken when a word is plualized non-concatenatively as in ترم /tirm/ (term in English) and أترام atrām/ (terms in English). The results show a comparable priming effect for both types of pluralizations indicating that cognates in Arabic-English bilinguals may have a shared morphological representation since the magnitude of priming was not affected by the type of pluralization. This similar priming effect for concatenative and non-concatenative pluralization indicates that cognates may share a special kind of morphological representation as suggested by the morphological account.

Author: Alhassan Alzahrani

0000-0003-4547-6582 aajzahrani@bu.edu.sa

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