Word Recognition in Urdu

INTRODUCTIONUrdu is an Indo-Aryan language with a Persio-Arabic script. Its linguistic roots, grammar and lexicon are based on Sanskrit. It also borrows lexicon, non-concatenative feature, triconsonantal root, orthography and the like from Arabic, a Semetic language. Although the salient feature of triconsonantal root and word pattern seen in Arabic is unknown to Urdu, the basic rule of word formation is similar in Urdu. In other words, words in Urdu are formed from the triconsonantal root combining with vowels or consonants to form words. The root is the basis of a words' structure and the affixation of vowels and consonants give grammatical category. The root and the affixation are an integral part of word formation in Urdu. The loanwords undergo nativization processes with Arabic, Persian or Indic affixation and hence bring about changes in phonology and modification of base (Islam, 2011).Objectives1. A preliminary investigation on word recognition in Urdu.2. Differential processing strategies for different word types during word recognition.Like Hebrew/Arabic and unlike English, word recognition in Urdu is of special interest because words are context specific and get their phonology accordingly, e.g. bS can be read as kya or kiya. Letters have different size and shapes according to the position they occur in the word. Words are phonologically opaque as letters mostly carry consonantal information and diacritical markers are omitted rendering Urdu with a phonologically opaque, visually complex orthography and a complex morphology (Khan, 2014).Studies in processing inflected and derived forms have shown mixed results. While some studies produced similar effects, others reported larger effects for inflections than derivations (Feldman, 1994; Raveh & Rueckl, 2000; Sanchez-Casas, Igoa, & Garcia-Albea, 2003). Evidence from masked priming studies suggests automatic morphological decomposition (Rastle, Davis, Marslen_Wilson, & Tyler, 2000) and that any word is first decomposed into its respective stem and affix for derived and inflected word forms (Meunier & Marslen_Wilson, 2004). These studies and a few others converge with evidence for automatic morphological segmentation independent of word meaning (Morris, Grainger, & Holcomb, 2008)The present study is interesting in the sense that both inflectional and derivational word forms share same letters (orthographic overlap) but are different functionally. The inflectional forms carry the grammatical category and syntactic function without changing the basic meaning of the base while the derivational word forms contribute to the thematic role, have no syntactic function, indicate grammatical category and are specially implicated in the semantic variation of words. This is very similar to Hebrew (Alvarez, Urrutia, Dominguez, & Sanchez-Casas, 2011).We hypothesized that response time for base word and derivatives would be faster than inflectional word forms. We expected this because base words and derivatives are whole word forms while the extensions (inflections) have affixations. We expect whole word processing in the former and Taft and Forster's model of prefix stripping (Taft & Forster, 1975) in the latter. We also expected to see if word length was a confounding factor during word recognition. Additionally, we hypothesized differential processing strategies between extensions (inflection) and derivative word forms.EXPERIMENTParticipantsThirty undergraduate students between the age groups of 20- 25 years (Mean age 21.67, SD- 2.41) participated in the study. All participants had studied with Urdu as the medium of instruction in elementary school and as the first language of study at undergraduate level with Urdu as their mother tongue. They were paid for their participation. Every participant had normal /corrected vision and normal hearing.Stimulus Material500 words were selected from school text books and newspapers and were tested for frequency on a 7 point scale. …