We examined the contributions of segment type (consonants vs. vowels) and segment ratio to word recognition in Arabic sentences, a language that has a nonconcatenative morphological system in which consonants indicate semantic information, while vowels indicate structural information. In two experiments (with a balanced vowel-to-consonant ratio in Experiment 1 and an imbalanced ratio in Experiment 2), we presented participants with spoken sentences in Modern Standard Arabic, in which either consonants or vowels had been replaced by silence, and asked them to report what they could understand. The results indicate that consonants play a much greater role than vowels, both for balanced and also imbalanced sentences. The results also show greater word recognition for stimuli that contained a higher ratio of consonants to vowels. These results support and supplement previous findings on the role of consonantal roots in word recognition in Semitic languages, but clearly differ from those previously reported for non-Semitic languages which highlight the role of vowels in word recognition at the sentence level. We interpret this within the framework of root-and-pattern morphology, and further argue that segmental effects on word recognition and speech processing are crucially modulated by morphological structure.

中文翻译：

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对阿拉伯语句子中单词识别的分段贡献

我们检查了句段类型（辅音与元音）和句段比率对阿拉伯语句子中单词识别的贡献，阿拉伯语句子是一种具有非连接形态系统的语言，其中辅音表示语义信息，而元音表示结构信息。在两个实验中（实验 1 中元音辅音比例平衡，实验 2 中元音辅音比例不平衡），我们向参与者展示了现代标准阿拉伯语的口语句子，其中辅音或元音已被沉默取代，并询问他们报告他们能理解的内容。结果表明，对于平衡和不平衡的句子，辅音比元音起着更大的作用。结果还显示，对于包含较高辅音与元音比例的刺激，单词识别能力更强。这些结果支持并补充了先前关于辅音词根在闪米特语单词识别中的作用的研究结果，但明显不同于之前针对非闪米特语言报告的结果，后者强调了元音在句子级别的单词识别中的作用。我们在根和模式形态学的框架内解释这一点，并进一步论证了词识别和语音处理的分段效应是由形态结构决定性地调节的。