THE MENTAL REPRESENTATION OF SINGULAR AND PLURAL NOUNS IN ALGERIAN ARABIC AS REVEALED THROUGH AUDITORY PRIMING IN AGRAMMATIC APHASIC PATIENTS

Working within the theoretical framework of prosodic nonconcatenative morphology developed by McCarthy (1975) for Semitic languages, we addr essed, in the present paper, the issues of lexical representation, mor phological relatedness, and modes of access in Algerian Arabic-a diale ct of Standard Arabic-in an auditory morphological priming experiment. More specifically, we investigated the process of word recognition of singular and plural nouns in the performance of 24 non-brain-damaged subjects and 2 Algerian-speaking agrammatic aphasics. Plurals in Arabi c involve either suffixation as in the sound plural (e.g., Ibas ''dres s''/lbasat ''dresses''), or stem-internal changes as in the broken plu rals (e.g., kursi ''chair''/krasa ''chairs''). Our findings reveal a d ifferential processing of the two forms; indicating whole word access for broken plurals and decomposition into word and suffix for suffixed plurals. Further, the evidence suggests for Algerian Arabic an archit ecture of the lexicon reflecting a family-like organization which take s into account language-specific features. (C) 1998 Academic Press.