Reading Consonants and Guessing Vowels: Visual Word Recognition in Hebrew Orthography

This chapter describes the specific characteristics of Hebrew orthography and discusses their origin with regard to the complex morphology of the Hebrew language. Their possible effects on the reading strategies adopted by beginning and skilled readers are examined. The pointed and unpointed Hebrew orthography presents an opportunity to examine reading processes when full or partial phonologic information is conveyed by print. This provides a significant methodological tool for investigating the effects of orthographic depth on visual word recognition, yet avoiding the pitfalls of cross-language designs. Research in reading Hebrew suggests that reading strategies are affected by the presentation or the omission of vowel marks. Efficient reading of unpointed text is based on fast recognition of orthographic clusters that become phonologically and semantically unequivocal given the available context. In contrast, the presentation of vowel marks induces a phonological processing of the printed words, which is often characteristic of shallow orthographies. This suggests that the reader of Hebrew adopts flexible reading strategies that take advantage of all possible phonemic information provided by the print.