TY - JOUR
T1 - Words with and without internal structure
T2 - What determines the nature of orthographic and morphological processing?
AU - Velan, Hadas
AU - Frost, Ram
PY - 2011/2
Y1 - 2011/2
N2 - Recent studies suggest that basic effects which are markers of visual word recognition in Indo-European languages cannot be obtained in Hebrew or in Arabic. Although Hebrew has an alphabetic writing system, just like English, French, or Spanish, a series of studies consistently suggested that simple form-orthographic priming, or letter-transposition priming are not found in Hebrew. In four experiments, we tested the hypothesis that this is due to the fact that Semitic words have an underlying structure that constrains the possible alignment of phonemes and their respective letters. The experiments contrasted typical Semitic words which are root-derived, with Hebrew words of non-Semitic origin, which are morphologically simple and resemble base-words in European languages. Using RSVP, TL priming, and form-priming manipulations, we show that Hebrew readers process Hebrew words which are morphologically simple similar to the way they process English words. These words indeed reveal the typical form-priming and TL priming effects reported in European languages. In contrast, words with internal structure are processed differently, and require a different code for lexical access. We discuss the implications of these findings for current models of visual word recognition.
AB - Recent studies suggest that basic effects which are markers of visual word recognition in Indo-European languages cannot be obtained in Hebrew or in Arabic. Although Hebrew has an alphabetic writing system, just like English, French, or Spanish, a series of studies consistently suggested that simple form-orthographic priming, or letter-transposition priming are not found in Hebrew. In four experiments, we tested the hypothesis that this is due to the fact that Semitic words have an underlying structure that constrains the possible alignment of phonemes and their respective letters. The experiments contrasted typical Semitic words which are root-derived, with Hebrew words of non-Semitic origin, which are morphologically simple and resemble base-words in European languages. Using RSVP, TL priming, and form-priming manipulations, we show that Hebrew readers process Hebrew words which are morphologically simple similar to the way they process English words. These words indeed reveal the typical form-priming and TL priming effects reported in European languages. In contrast, words with internal structure are processed differently, and require a different code for lexical access. We discuss the implications of these findings for current models of visual word recognition.
KW - Form-priming
KW - Letter transpositions
KW - Morphological processing
KW - Orthographic processing
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=78651079794&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.11.013
DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.11.013
M3 - ???researchoutput.researchoutputtypes.contributiontojournal.article???
C2 - 21163472
AN - SCOPUS:78651079794
SN - 0010-0277
VL - 118
SP - 141
EP - 156
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
IS - 2
ER -