Auditory Word Recognition in Tashlhit/Berber: Supraliminal Speech Priming

The present study investigates lexical access in Tashlhit, an understudied Hamitic-Semitic language in the psycholinguistic field. We tested the hypothesis that the root morpheme has a lexical status in the Tashlhit lexicon. With this end in mind, we also examined the semantic and phonological factors in lexical access. We report here on two lexical decision experiments using supraliminal priming technique in which the participants are consciously aware of the prime. We used the auditory modality where target and prime words were audible. The results showed a priming effect by pairs sharing the root morpheme with an opaque or transparent semantic relation, but no priming effect was obtained by pairs sharing only phonological properties.