Recent studies suggest that basic effects which are markers of visual word recognition in IndoEuropean 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.What determines lexical architecture in alphabetic orthographies? Fast and efficient recognition of words requires some form of organization so that the visual analysis of their constituent letters be mapped into lexical representation within minimal time. Most, if not all, models of visual word recognition assume, therefore, that the lexical architecture mimics the alphabetic principle, and that the processing system is tuned to the word's linear orthographic structure. Consider, for example, the Entry-Opening model (Forster & Davis, 1984;Forster, 1999). It assumes that lexical entries are organized into bins based on their orthographic form, so that words sharing similar letter sequences (or orthographic neighbours) are located in the same bin. Upon presentation of a printed word, the orthographic properties of the input are used to calculate an approximate address (i.e., a bin number), which considers the array of letters in the word. Alternatively, in various types of interactive activation models (e.g., IAM, McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981; the Multiple Read Out Model, Grainger & Jacobs, 1996; the Dual-Route-Cascaded model, Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, & Ziegler, 2001; or the Connectionist Dual Process models (CDP, and CDP+, Zorzi, Houghton, & Butterworth, 1998;Perry, Ziegler & Zorzi, 2007) letter identity and letter position of the input contributes one way or another to the amount of activation of top-level word units. Hence, the architecture of these models is structured so that relative excitation or © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Mailing address: Prof. Ram Frost, Department of Psychology, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 91905 Israel, frost@mscc.huji.ac.il. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that ...

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We examined the effects of letter transposition in Hebrew in three masked-priming experiments. Hebrew, like English has an alphabetic orthography where sequential and contiguous letter strings represent phonemes. However, being a Semitic language it has a non-concatenated morphology that is based on root derivations. Experiment 1 showed that transposed-letter (TL) root primes inhibited responses to targets derived from the non-transposed root letters, and that this inhibition was unrelated to relative root frequency. Experiment 2 replicated this result and showed that if the transposed letters of the root created a nonsense-root that had no lexical representation, then no inhibition and no facilitation were obtained. Finally, Experiment 3 demonstrated that in contrast to English, French, or Spanish, TL nonword primes did not facilitate recognition of targets, and when the root letters embedded in them consisted of a legal root morpheme, they produced inhibition. These results suggest that lexical space in alphabetic orthographies may be structured very differently in different languages if their morphological structure diverges qualitatively. In Hebrew, lexical space is organized according to root families rather than simple orthographic structure, so that all words derived from the same root are interconnected or clustered together, independent of overall orthographic similarity. KeywordsMorphology; Letter Transposition; Hebrew; Masked-Priming Lexical architecture is often described as a high-dimensional perceptual space that is defined in terms of orthographic, phonological, and semantic properties, where words are represented as points within this space. A typical example is attractor-based models where each word has a unique attractor, and the process of word recognition is then described in terms of a trajectory of the system through its state space (e.g., Rueckl, 2002;Harm, McCandliss & Seidenberg, 2003;Harm & Seidenberg, 2004;Elman, 2004). The initial point of this trajectory is some random position in the state space, and the final point is an attractor basin corresponding to the input word. In visual word recognition research, the relative position of word units is usually determined according to orthographic properties, so the distance between two words that are orthographically similar is necessarily shorter than the distance between words which are dissimilar. Also, since in most triangular models there are subspaces organized by different linguistic properties (orthographic, phonological, and semantic), with brief exposure durations, Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Ram Frost, Department of Psychology, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 91905, Israel. Email: frost@mscc.huji.ac.il. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before...

The present paper investigates whether Semitic languages impose a rigid triconsonantal structural principle on root-morpheme representation, by examining morphological priming effects obtained with primes consisting of weak roots. For weak roots, the complete three-consonantal structure is not kept in most of their derivations, and only two letters are consistently repeated in all derivations. In a series of masked priming experiments subjects were presented with primes consisting of the weak roots letters which are repeated in all derivations. The results showed that the two consistent letters of weak roots facilitated the recognition of targets derived from these roots. In contrast, any two letters of complete roots did not facilitate the recognition of complete root derivations. The implications of these results to Parallel-Distributed models and to localist-representational approaches, are discussed.Although lexical structure is traditionally regarded as an interplay of orthographic, phonological, and semantic units, the view that morphological considerations need to be introduced into any model of the mental lexicon has been gaining increasing support. How morphological factors determine lexical organisation is, however, the focus of recent debates. Two contrasting approaches can be outlined to describe the present controversy. The Parallel-Distributed Processing (PDP) view of lexical Correspondence should be addressed to Ram Frost,

Hebrew provides an intriguing contrast to European languages. On the one hand, like any European language, it has an alphabetic script. On the other hand, being a Semitic language, it differs in the structure of base words. By monitoring eye movements, we examined the time-course of processing letter transpositions in Hebrew, and assessed their impact on reading different types of Hebrew words that differ in their internal structure. We found that letter transposition resulted in dramatic reading costs for words with Semitic word structure, and much smaller costs for non-Semitic words. Moreover, the strongest impact of transposition occurred where root-letter transposition resulted in a pseudo-root, where significant interference emerged already in first fixation duration. Our findings thus suggest that Hebrew readers differentiate between Semitic and non-Semitic forms already at first fixation, at the early phase of word recognition. Moreover, letters are differentially processed across the visual array, given their morphological structure and their contribution to recovering semantic meaning. We conclude that flexibility or rigidity in encoding letter position is determined by cues regarding the internal structure of printed words.

Complex words in Hebrew are composed of two non-concatenated morphemes: a consonantal root embedded in a nominal or verbal word-pattern morpho-phonological unit made up of vowels or vowels and consonants. Research on written-word recognition has revealed a robust effect of the roots and the verbal-patterns, but not of the nominal-patterns, on word recognition. These findings suggest that the Hebrew lexicon is organized and accessed via roots. We explored the hypothesis that the absence of a nominal-pattern effect reflects methodological limitations of the experimental paradigms used in previous studies. Specifically, the potential facilitative effect induced by a shared nominal-pattern was counteracted by an interference effect induced by the competition between the roots of two words derived from different roots but with the same nominal-pattern. In the current study, a fast-priming paradigm for sentence reading and a "delayed-letters" procedure were used to isolate the initial effect of nominal-patterns on lexical access. The results, based on eye-fixation latency, demonstrated a facilitatory effect induced by nominal-pattern primes relative to orthographic control primes when presented for 33 or 42 ms. The results are discussed in relation to the role of the word-pattern as an organizing principle of the Hebrew lexicon, together with the roots.

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