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.

具有非连接形态的语言通常声称在其词典中包含辅音词根语素。先前的心理语言学研究强化了根假设，表明阿拉伯语、希伯来语和马耳他语中的词的主要目标具有相同的词干辅音，语义关系发挥的作用有限。我们对以前的心理语言学研究进行了重新分析，并声称具有固有辅音偏差的单词识别模型可以同样很好地解释这些发现，使辅音词根的概念成为单词识别模型多余的形态单位，从而破坏了辅音词根的心理语言学论证。我们进一步提请注意形式相似性在具有连接形态的语言（例如荷兰语、英语、法语）中的单词识别中的平行效果。因此，我们的叙述将闪族语言的使用者和读者与印欧语系的同龄人置于同等地位。