Segmental contributions to word recognition in Arabic sentences

Abstract We examined the contributions of segment type (consonants vs. vowels) and segment ratio to word recognition in Arabic sentences, a language that has a nonconcatenative morphological system in which consonants indicate semantic information, while vowels indicate structural information. In two experiments (with a balanced vowel-to-consonant ratio in Experiment 1 and an imbalanced ratio in Experiment 2), we presented participants with spoken sentences in Modern Standard Arabic, in which either consonants or vowels had been replaced by silence, and asked them to report what they could understand. The results indicate that consonants play a much greater role than vowels, both for balanced and also imbalanced sentences. The results also show greater word recognition for stimuli that contained a higher ratio of consonants to vowels. These results support and supplement previous findings on the role of consonantal roots in word recognition in Semitic languages, but clearly differ from those previously reported for non-Semitic languages which highlight the role of vowels in word recognition at the sentence level. We interpret this within the framework of root-and-pattern morphology, and further argue that segmental effects on word recognition and speech processing are crucially modulated by morphological structure.