The Role of Morphology in Word Recognition of Hebrew as a
                     Templatic Language
                       Marina Oganyan
                       Adissertation
                  submitted in partial fulfillment of the
                    requirements for the degree of
                      Doctor of Philosophy
                     University of Washington
                          2017
                      Reading Committee:
                     Julia Herschensohn, Chair
                     Richard Wright, Chair
                        Akira Omaki
                       Lee Osterhout
                  Program Authorized to Offer Degree:
                        Linguistics
                       ©Copyright 2017
                       Marina Oganyan
                     University of Washington
                        Abstract
         The Role of Morphology in Word Recognition of Hebrew as a Templatic Language
                       Marina Oganyan
                 Co-Chairs of the Supervisory Committee:
                    Professor Julia Herschensohn
                     Department of Linguistics
                     Professor Richard Wright
                     Department of Linguistics
       Research on recognition of complex words has primarily focused on affixational complexity
       in concatenative languages. This dissertation investigates both templatic and affixational
       complexity in Hebrew, a templatic language, with particular focus on the role of the root
       and template morphemes in recognition. It also explores the role of morphology in word
       recognition across modality (visual vs. auditory). Finally, it investigates whether acquisition
       of visual word recognition processes in Hebrew by speakers of a concatenative (non-templatic)
       language is dependent upon age of acquisition or age of arrival.
        Thefindingsfornativespeakersinthisdissertationsuggestthatbothtemplaticwordsand
       affixedwords in Hebrew are decomposed into their constituent morphemes and for templatic
       words this decomposition is the default. In templatic words, the root and template play
       different roles in recognition. For nouns the role of the root is particularly important, as
       evidenced by sensitivity to letter position, while for verbs both roots and templates play
       key roles (Chapter 4). A phonemic restoration paradigm provides evidence of templatic
       morphology playing a key role in auditory word recognition. As with visual recognition of
       nouns, roots play an important role in auditory noun recognition as evidenced by words
       with root sounds masked being harder to recover than words with template sounds masked
       (Chapter 5). In Hebrew, as with conctatenative languages, inflectional words show evidence
       of decomposition into stem and affix with a larger amplitude N400 for inflectionally affixed
       templatic words than unaffixed ones. Furthermore, higher processing costs are revealed for
       concatenative borrowings into the language than templatic words, with greater amplitude
       peakers in the 200-300 ms time-window, suggesting that for templatic words decomposition
       is the default strategy (Chapter 6).
        Results of the L2 Hebrew study suggest that even proficient readers show transfer effects
       from a concatenative L1. Unlike native readers, they are letter position flexible for root
       letters in nouns with nouns with transposed letters priming, suggesting that a whole-stem
       representation of templatic words is available. These effects are not shown to correlate with
       either age of acquisition or arrival (Chapter 7).