Doctoral Dissertation Research: Morphological Decomposition in Arabic

当我们听到一个单词时，许多因素会影响我们判断所听到的确实是母语单词的速度和准确性。当听到一个单词时，词频是一个特别显著的预测听者行为的指标；使用频率高的单词比使用频率低的单词识别起来更快。此外，词缀和前缀等单个词的出现频率也会影响人们对整个词的识别。这些现象对于存储和处理的心理语言学模型很重要，这些模型代表了人们如何获取一种语言的单词，将它们存储在他们的脑海中，并在他们必须感知或产生它们时检索它们。这些模型为语言教学以及语言障碍的诊断和治疗提供了有效的方法。然而，关注频率在单词识别中的作用的研究主要局限于印欧语言，这导致了人类学习、识别和产生语言的机制的不完整画面。本心理语言学研究的主要目的是探索频率在约旦安曼阿拉伯语口语方言中的单词识别作用。这项研究需要心理语言学实验来测量人们对各种口语的反应，这些口语的不同是基于它们所包含的部分的频率。此外，这些研究包括个人语言历史的收集，以及来自网络、聊天和广播领域的文本和文本的收集。这项研究将有助于更深入地了解阿拉伯语使用者是如何决定他们方言中一个单词的构成的，以及这个单词的哪些属性会影响他们这样做的速度和准确性。确定哪些单词部分对记忆和访问贡献最大，将有助于以更明智的方式向非母语人士教授阿拉伯语方言。专注于哪些词实际上属于这种特定方言的可靠数据将有助于编写词典和建立词典，加强阿拉伯方言口语的稀缺资源。

When we hear a word, many factors affect the speed and accuracy with which we decide that what we have heard is indeed a word of our language. Word frequency is a particularly salient predictor of a listener's behavior when presented with a word; words which are more frequent are recognized more quickly than words which are less frequent. Moreover, the frequency of individual word parts such as suffixes and prefixes also have an effect on the recognition of the word as a whole. These phenomena are important for psycholinguistic models of storage and processing which represent how people acquire words of a language, store them in their minds, and retrieve them when they must perceive or produce them. Such models inform effective methods for teaching language as well as diagnosis and treatment of language disorders. However, studies focusing on the role of frequency in word recognition have been largely limited to Indo-European languages, which results in an incomplete picture of the mechanisms which allow humans to learn, recognize and produce language. The main goal of this psycholinguistic research is to explore the role of frequency in word recognition for a colloquial dialect of Arabic spoken in Amman, Jordan. This research entails psycholinguistic experiments measuring reactions to a variety of kinds of spoken words which differ based on the frequencies of the parts that they contain. Furthermore, these studies involve the collection of personal linguistic histories, as well as the gathering of texts and transcripts from Web, chat, and broadcast domains. This research will contribute to a richer understanding of how Arabic speakers determine what constitutes a word of their dialect, and what properties of the word affect the speed and accuracy with which they do so. Determining which word parts contribute most to their storage and access in the mind will result in more informed ways of teaching colloquial Arabic dialects to non-native speakers. Robust data focusing on which words actually belong to this particular dialect will contribute to dictionary-writing and lexicon-building, strengthening the scarce resources which exist for spoken Arabic dialects.