Verbs and nouns are organized and accessed differently in the mental lexicon: evidence from Hebrew

A masked priming paradigm was used to examine the role of the root and verbal-pattern morphemes in lexical access within the verbal system of Hebrew. Previous research within the nominal system had showed facilitatory effects from masked primes that shared the same root as the target word, but not when the primes shared the word pattern (R. Frost, K. I. Forster, & A. Deutsch, 1997). In contrast to these findings, facilitatory effects were obtained for both roots and word patterns in the verbal system. In addition, verbal pattern facilitation was obtained even when the primes were pseudoverbs consisting of illegal combinations of roots and verbal patterns. Significant priming was also found when the primes and the targets contained the same root. The results are discussed with reference to the factors that may determine the lexical status of morphological units in lexical organization. A model of morphological processing of Hebrew words is proposed.