Two partially independent issues are addressed in two auditory rating studies: under what circumstances is a sub-string of a sentence identified as a stand-alone sentence, and under what circumstances do globally ill-formed but 'locally coherent' analyses (Tabor, Galantucci, & Richardson., 2004) emerge? A new type of locally coherent structure is established in Experiment 1, where a that-less complement clause is at least temporarily analyzed as a stand-alone sentence when it corresponds to a prosodic phrase. In Experiment 2, reduced relative clause structures like those in Tabor et al. were investigated. As in Experiment 1, the root sentence (mis-)analyses emerged most frequently when the locally coherent clause corresponded to a prosodic phrase. However, a substantial number of locally coherent analyses emerged even without prosodic help, especially in examples with for-datives (which do not grammatically permit a reduced relative clause structure for some speakers). Overall, the results suggest that prosodic grouping of constituents encourages analysis of a sub-string as a root sentence, and raise the question of whether all local coherence structures involve analysis of an utterance-final sub-string as a root sentence.
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.