Preliminary morphological family size results

Although these results are only preliminary, and therefore to be interpreted with caution, it seems to be the case that the auditory lexical decision task recently run in Jerusalem shows the following:

1. there is a facilitatory effect of word frequency; that is, the more frequent a word in Hebrew, the faster its reaction time.

2. there is a facilitatory effect of related family size; that is, the more semantically-related morphological relatives a word has, the faster its reaction time.

3. there is an inhibitory effect of unrelated family size; that is, the more semantically-unrelated morphological relatives a word has, the slower its reaction time.

None of these results is *too* surprising, and in fact they replicate the identical effects found in the visual study on Hebrew done by Moscoso del Prado-Martin et al. 2005 in Journal of Memory and Language. However, never before have ANY of these effects been actually documented in Hebrew in spoken word recognition, and I am very proud to be the first to find such effects.