The Role of Nominal Word Pattern in Arabic Reading Acquisition: Insights from Cross-modal Priming

The morphological structure of the word has a central function in the organization of the mental lexicon and word recognition. Polymorphemic words in Arabic are composed of two non-concatenated morphemes: root and word-pattern. This study is the first to address the issue of nominal-pattern priming among young developing Arabic speakers. I examined cross-modal priming using words derived from the same nominal-pattern as the target (/ruku:b/-/duxu:l/riding-entrance) relative to prime words that included a different word-pattern than the target, while preserving phonological similarity (/duxa:n/-/duxu:l/“smoke”-“entrance”) in two groups: second- and fifth-graders. The findings showed facilitation of lexical decisions about target words, in terms of accuracy but not reaction times in both grades. These findings may stem from the morpho-orthographic nature of the Arabic written word and the information conveyed by the nominal word-pattern.