MULTIMAP: Multilingual picture naming test for mapping eloquent areas during awake surgeries.

Picture naming tasks are currently the gold standard for identifying and preserving language-related areas during awake brain surgery. With multilingual populations increasing worldwide, patients frequently need to be tested in more than one language. There is still no reliable testing instrument, as the available batteries have been developed for specific languages. Heterogeneity in the selection criteria for stimuli leads to differences, for example, in the size, color, image quality, and even names associated with pictures, making direct cross-linguistic comparisons difficult. Here we present MULTIMAP, a new multilingual picture naming test for mapping eloquent areas during awake brain surgery. Recognizing that the distinction between nouns and verbs is necessary for detailed and precise language mapping, MULTIMAP consists of a database of 218 standardized color pictures representing both objects and actions. These images have been tested for name agreement with speakers of Spanish, Basque, Catalan, Italian, French, English, German, Mandarin Chinese, and Arabic, and have been controlled for relevant linguistic features in cross-language combinations. The MULTIMAP test for objects and verbs represents an alternative to the Oral Denomination 80 (DO 80) monolingual pictorial set currently used in language mapping, providing an open-source, standardized set of up-to-date pictures, where relevant linguistic variables across several languages have been taken into account in picture creation and selection.

Matrices of the frequency and similarity of Arabic letters and allographs.

Indicators of letter frequency and similarity have long been available for Indo-European languages. They have not only been pivotal in controlling the design of experimental psycholinguistic studies seeking to determine the factors that underlie reading ability and literacy acquisition, but have also been useful for studies examining the more general aspects of human cognition. Despite their importance, however, such indicators are still not available for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), a language that, by virtue of its orthographic system, presents an invaluable environment for the experimental investigation of visual word processing. This paper presents for the first time the frequencies of Arabic letters and their allographs based on a 40-million-word corpus, along with their similarity/confusability indicators in three domains: (1) the visual domain, based on human ratings; (2) the auditory domain, based on an analysis of the phonetic features of letter sounds; and (3) the motoric domain, based on an analysis of the stroke features used to write letters and their allographs. Taken together, the frequency and similarity of Arabic letters and their allographs in the visual and motoric domains, as well as the similarities among the letter sounds, will be useful for researchers interested in the processes underpinning orthographic processing, visual word recognition, reading, and literacy acquisition.

Transposed letter priming effects and allographic variation in Arabic: Insights from lexical decision and the same-different task.

Reading is resilient to distortion of letter order within a word. This is evidenced in the "transposed-letter (TL) priming effect," the finding that a prime generated by transposing adjacent letters in a word (e.g., jugde) facilitates recognition of the base word (e.g., JUDGE), more than a "substituted-letter" control prime in which the transposed letters are replaced by unrelated letters (e.g., junpe -JUDGE). The TL priming effect is well documented for European languages that are written using the Roman alphabet. Unlike these languages, Arabic has a unique position-dependent allography whereby some letters change shape according to their position within a word. We investigate the TL priming effect using a lexical decision (Experiment 1) and a same-different match task with Arabic words (Experiment 2) and nonwords (Experiment 3). No TL priming effects were found in Experiment 1, suggesting that the lexical-decision task engages lexical access processes that are sensitive to the Semitic nonlinear morphological structure. Experiments 2 and 3 revealed a robust TL priming effect overall. Nonallographic TL primes produced significantly larger facilitation than allographic TL primes, indicating that Arabic readers use allographic variation to resolve the uncertainty in letter order during the early stages of orthographic processing. The implication of these results for current letter position coding models is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Non-Selective Lexical Access in Late Arabic-English Bilinguals: Evidence from Gating.

Previous research suggests that late bilinguals who speak typologically distant languages are the least likely to show evidence of non-selective lexical access processes. This study puts this claim to test by using the gating task to determine whether words beginning with speech sounds that are phonetically similar in Arabic and English (e.g., [b,d,m,n]) give rise to selective or non-selective lexical access processes in late Arabic-English bilinguals. The results show that an acoustic-phonetic input (e.g., [bæ]) that is consistent with words in Arabic (e.g., [bædrun] "moon") and English (e.g., [bæd] "bad") activates lexical representations in both languages of the bilingual. This non-selective activation holds equally well for mixed lists with words from both Arabic and English and blocked lists consisting only of Arabic or English words. These results suggest that non-selective lexical access processes are the default mechanism even in late bilinguals of typologically distant languages.

Structure, form, and meaning in the mental lexicon: evidence from Arabic.

Does the organization of the mental lexicon reflect the combination of abstract underlying morphemic units or the concatenation of word-level phonological units? We address these fundamental issues in Arabic, a Semitic language where every surface form is potentially analyzable into abstract morphemic units - the word pattern and the root - and where this view contrasts with stem-based approaches, chiefly driven by linguistic considerations, in which neither roots nor word patterns play independent roles in word formation and lexical representation. Five cross-modal priming experiments examine the processing of morphologically complex forms in the three major subdivisions of the Arabic lexicon - deverbal nouns, verbs, and primitive nouns. The results demonstrate that root and word pattern morphemes function as abstract cognitive entities, operating independently of semantic factors and dissociable from possible phonological confounds, while stem-based approaches consistently fail to accommodate the basic psycholinguistic properties of the Arabic mental lexicon.

Vowelling and semantic priming effects in Arabic.

In the present experiment we used a semantic judgment task with Arabic words to determine whether semantic priming effects are found in the Arabic language. Moreover, we took advantage of the specificity of the Arabic orthographic system, which is characterized by a shallow (i.e., vowelled words) and a deep orthography (i.e., unvowelled words), to examine the relationship between orthographic and semantic processing. Results showed faster Reaction Times (RTs) for semantically related than unrelated words with no difference between vowelled and unvowelled words. By contrast, Event Related Potentials (ERPs) revealed larger N1 and N2 components to vowelled words than unvowelled words suggesting that visual-orthographic complexity taxes the early word processing stages. Moreover, semantically unrelated Arabic words elicited larger N400 components than related words thereby demonstrating N400 effects in Arabic. Finally, the Arabic N400 effect was not influenced by orthographic depth. The implications of these results for understanding the processing of orthographic, semantic, and morphological structures in Modern Standard Arabic are discussed.

The differential time course for consonant and vowel processing in Arabic: implications for language learning and rehabilitation.

Educators and therapists in the Arab world have not been able to benefit from the recent integration of basic behavioral science with neuroscience. This is due to the paucity of basic research on Arabic. The present study is a step toward establishing the necessary structure for the emergence of neuro-rehabilitory and educational practices. It focuses on the recent claim that consonants and vowels have distinct representations, carry different kinds of information, and engage different processing mechanisms. This proposal has received support from various research fields, however it suprisingly stops short of making any claims about the time course of consonant and vowel processing in speech. This study specifically asks if consonants and vowels are processed differentially over time, and whether these time courses vary depending on the kind of information they are associated with. It does so in the context of a Semitic language, Arabic, where consonants typically convey semantic meaning in the form of tri-consonantal roots, and vowels carry phonological and morpho-syntactic information in the form of word patterns. Two cross-modal priming experiments evaluated priming by fragments of consonants that belong to the root, and fragments of vowels belonging to the word pattern. Consonant fragments were effective primes while vowel fragments were not. This demonstrates the existence of a differential processing time course for consonants and vowels in the auditory domain, reflecting in part the different linguistic functions they are associated with, and argues for the importance of assigning distinct representational and processing properties to these elements. At broader theoretical and practical levels, the present results provide a significant building block for the emergence of neuro-rehabilitory and neuro-educational traditions for Arabic.

Morphological structure in the Arabic mental lexicon: Parallels between standard and dialectal Arabic.

The Arabic language is acquired by its native speakers both as a regional spoken Arabic dialect, acquired in early childhood as a first language, and as the more formal variety known as Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), typically acquired later in childhood. These varieties of Arabic show a range of linguistic similarities and differences. Since previous psycholinguistic research in Arabic has primarily used MSA, it remains to be established whether the same cognitive properties hold for the dialects. Here we focus on the morphological level, and ask whether roots and word patterns play similar or different roles in MSA and in the regional dialect known as Southern Tunisian Arabic (STA). In two intra-modal auditory-auditory priming experiments, we found similar results with strong priming effects for roots and patterns in both varieties. Despite differences in the timing and nature of the acquisition of MSA and STA, root and word pattern priming was clearly distinguishable from form-based and semantic-based priming in both varieties. The implication of these results for theories of Arabic diglossia and theories of morphological processing are discussed.

Aralex: a lexical database for Modern Standard Arabic.

In this article, we present a new lexical database for Modern Standard Arabic: Aralex. Based on a contemporary text corpus of 40 million words, Aralex provides information about (1) the token frequencies of roots and word patterns, (2) the type frequency, or family size, of roots and word patterns, and (3) the frequency of bigrams, trigrams in orthographic forms, roots, and word patterns. Aralex will be a useful tool for studying the cognitive processing of Arabic through the selection of stimuli on the basis of precise frequency counts. Researchers can use it as a source of information on natural language processing, and it may serve an educational purpose by providing basic vocabulary lists. Aralex is distributed under a GNU-like license, allowing people to interrogate it freely online or to download it from www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk:8081/aralex.online/login.jsp.

Arabic morphology in the neural language system.

There are two views about morphology, the aspect of language concerned with the internal structure of words. One view holds that morphology is a domain of knowledge with a specific type of neurocognitive representation supported by specific brain mechanisms lateralized to left fronto-temporal cortex. The alternate view characterizes morphological effects as being a by-product of the correlation between form and meaning and where no brain area is predicted to subserve morphological processing per se. Here we provided evidence from Arabic that morphemes do have specific memory traces, which differ as a function of their functional properties. In an MMN study, we showed that the abstract consonantal root, which conveys semantic meaning (similarly to monomorphemic content words in English), elicits an MMN starting from 160 msec after the deviation point, whereas the abstract vocalic word pattern, which plays a range of grammatical roles, elicits an MMN response starting from 250 msec after the deviation point. Topographically, the root MMN has a symmetric fronto-central distribution, whereas the word pattern MMN lateralizes significantly to the left, indicating stronger involvement of left peri-sylvian areas. In languages with rich morphologies, morphemic processing seems to be supported by distinct neural networks, thereby providing evidence for a specific neuronal basis for morphology as part of the cerebral language machinery.

Allomorphic variation in Arabic: implications for lexical processing and representation.

This study probes the effects of allomorphy on access to Arabic roots and word patterns in two cross-modal priming experiments. Experiment 1 used strong roots which undergo no allomorphy, and weak roots which undergo allomorphy and surface with only two of their three consonants in some derivations. Word pairs sharing a root morpheme prime each other reliably not only when the root was strong (e.g., [see text] participant/participate), but also when it was weak (e.g., [see text] agreement-agree, where the weak root [wfq] surfaces fully in the target but not the prime). This facilitation occurred even when the weak root surfaced with different semantic meanings across prime and target (e.g., [see text] destination/confront). Experiment 2 assessed the effects of allomorphy on word pattern processing, comparing word pairs where the word pattern is transparently realised in both prime and target (e.g., [see text] spread/bear], with pairs which share the same underlying word pattern but where a weak root triggers an assimilation process in the prime (e.g., [see text] unite/smile). This assimilation process does not disrupt the CV-structure of the word pattern, in contrast to a third condition where this is disrupted in both prime and target (e.g., [see text] turn around/say). Strong priming effects were observed in the first two conditions but not in the third. The bearing of these findings on models of lexical processing and representation is discussed.

Abstract morphemes and lexical representation: the CV-Skeleton in Arabic.

Overlaps in form and meaning between morphologically related words have led to ambiguities in interpreting priming effects in studies of lexical organization. In Semitic languages like Arabic, however, linguistic analysis proposes that one of the three component morphemes of a surface word is the CV-Skeleton, an abstract prosodic unit coding the phonological shape of the surface word and its primary syntactic function, which has no surface phonetic content (McCarthy, J. J. (1981). A prosodic theory of non-concatenative morphology, Linguistic Inquiry, 12 373-418). The other two morphemes are proposed to be the vocalic melody, which conveys additional syntactic information, and the root, which defines meaning. In three experiments using masked, cross-modal, and auditory-auditory priming we examined the role of the vocalic melody and the CV-Skeleton as potential morphemic units in the processing and representation of Arabic words. Prime/target pairs sharing the vocalic melody but not the CV-Skeleton consistently failed to prime. In contrast, word pairs sharing only the CV-Skeleton primed reliably throughout, with the amount of priming being as large as that observed between word pattern pairs sharing both vocalic melody and CV-Skeleton. Priming between morphologically related words can be observed when there is no overlap either in meaning or in surface phonetic form.