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

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