STRUCTURE AND WORD ORDER IN ENGLISH AND ARABIC

Comparing Structure and Word Order in English and Arabic

Comparing Structure and Word Order in English and Arabic

Introduction

The heart and core of this paper is to compare the structure and word order in English and Arabic languages. The comparison of Structure and Word Orders while people read different languages provides a rich framework within which to examine the seam between the effects of learning and the design characteristics of the brain. This area combines three different hypotheses:

Hypotheses

1) the comparison of the functional architecture of language abilities, which has an evolutionary history and is well documented;

2) the neural substrate of reading, which is a relatively recent human achievement, and is parasitic upon language abilities; and

3) well-defined differences between the structure of languages in general, and in the manner in which they represent spoken language in their orthography in particular.

The present experiments are part of a research plan that takes advantage of some principled differences between English and Arabic, Arabic, and English, to explore a componential analysis of the reading process in different languages, and the effects of different components (visual, orthographic, and morphological demands) on the Structure and Word Orders in reading. The three languages utilize alphabetic orthographies, but differ in interesting ways: in reading direction, orthographic complexity, and morphological structure. In the present study we examine the effects of these differences on the involvement of the two Word Order in a lateralized lexical-decision task, and focus on differences in morphological structure.

In English, which has a concatenative morphology, multimorphemic words are usually created by affixation, where the stem is usually a word itself, and its orthographic integrity is largely preserved. Arabic and English and Arabic are characterized by a nonconcatenative, highly productive derivational morphology (Berman, 1978). Most words are derived by embedding a root into a morphophonological word pattern. In both languages, most words are based on a trilateral root and various derivatives that are formed by the addition of affixes and vowels. The roots and phonological patterns are abstract entities and only their joint combination forms specific words. The core meaning is conveyed by the root, while the phonological pattern conveys word class information. For example, in Arabic the word TAKREEM consists of the root KRM, whose semantic space includes things having to do with respect, and the phonological pattern TA_ _ EE_. The combination results in the word 'honor.' In English and Arabic, the word SIFRA consists of the root SFR- whose semantic space includes things having to do with counting, and the phonological pattern _I_ _A, which tends to occur in words denoting singular feminine nouns, resulting in the word 'numeral.' The letters that make up the root may be dispersed across the word, interdigitated with letters that can double as vowels and other consonants that belong to the morphological pattern.

A number of psycholinguistic studies (Frost & Bentin, 2005; Feldman, Frost, & Pnini, 2005; Frost, Forster, & Deutsch, 2005; Deutsch, Frost, & Forster, 2005; Berent, 2002) have explored the effects of ...