Languages belonging to the Semitic sub-family of the Afro-Asiatic language family are known for their very unusual characteristics. Most famous among these is the discontiguous nature of the elements that make up related words in these languages. For instance, the Hebrew words gadal 'he grew', gadol 'big', higdila 'she enlarged' and migdal 'tower' all share a meaning connected to size, yet it is impossible to isolate a contiguous string of sounds shared by these words. Instead, the words share the three root consonants 'gdl', which never occur by themselves in isolation. A long-standing question about word structure in this type of language concerns the possible ways in which native speakers of Hebrew and other Semitic languages store these words in their mind. One theory hypothesizes that the unit 'gdl' is stored, while another theory hypothesizes that the actual words themselves are stored. This project will investigate which of these theories is more likely to be correct by studying two Semitic languages, Hebrew and Maltese. Databases for each language will be created in order to properly document and compute words in these languages, along with their relevant properties. Psycholinguistic experiments will then be carried out in order to probe how speakers of these languages store words.
The database component of the research project will be of great use to other researchers in a variety of fields. Additionally, the research will encourage cross-disciplinary research on these languages, and promote the visibility of Maltese, which is an under-documented language. The research has potential consequences for language pedagogy, because it will lead to new knowledge about the mental retrieval of words in Hebrew and Maltese.
This project is co-funded by the Office of International Science and Engineering.
