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…

The present study examined visual word recognition processes in Hebrew (a Semitic language) among beginning learners whose first language (L1) was either Semitic (Arabic) or Indo-European (e.g. English). To examine if learners, like native Hebrew speakers, exhibit morphological sensitivity to root and word-pattern morphemes, learners made an…

A study of Chinese logograph recognition investigated: (1) whether word-length effect is generalizable to Chinese readers in recognizing context-free logographic characters; (2) whether readers from mainland China would outperform readers from Taiwan when each group read its own familiar logograph version; (3) whether both groups would perform…

Focuses on how second language (L2) readers go about decoding word forms. The article describes a psycholinguistic experiment investigating how advanced Finnish speakers of English as a foreign language pronounced monosyllabic pseudo-words based on common real-word orthographic patterns in English. Results indicate that even advanced L2 readers'…

A study investigated lexical decision-making among Dutch-English bilinguals in the auditory modality. Subjects, bilinguals at three proficiency levels (intermediate, high, and near-native) were presented with 40 cognate and 40 non-cognate word pairs, a similar number of English and Dutch distractors, and a similar number of nonsense words in each…

A study investigated the processes used by bilinguals for organizing vocabulary by presenting subjects with bilingual word recognition tasks in two modalities (aural and visual) and using a repetition paradigm. Subjects were asked to decide whether a word presented to them was a nonsense word or a real word. Two separate experiments are described.…