The roots of consonant bias in semitic languages: a critical review of psycholinguistic studies of languages with non-concatenative morphology

Languages with non-concatenative morphology are often claimed to include consonantal root morphemes in their lexicon. Previous psycholinguistic studies strengthened the Root Hypothesis, showing that words in Arabic, Hebrew, and Maltese prime targets with the same stem consonants, with semantic relation playing a limited role. We provide a re-analysis of previous psycholinguistic studies and claim that a model of word recognition with an inherent consonant bias can explain these findings equally well, making the notion of the consonantal root as a morphological unit superfluous for word recognition models, and thus undermining the psycholinguistic argument for the consonantal root. We further draw attention to parallel effects of form similarity in word recognition in languages with concatenative morphology (e.g. Dutch, English, French). Our account therefore puts speakers and readers of Semitic languages on a par with their Indo-European peers.