Words with and without internal structure: What determines the nature of orthographic and morphological processing?

Abstract

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 ...

Are all Semitic languages immune to letter transpositions? The case of Maltese

“…Thus, the transposition of two letters of the consonantal root in Semitic languages would make it difficult to access the actual word. Velan and Frost (2011) successfully replicated their 2007 RSVP experiment with a new set of English sentences and a new set of Hebrew sentences with root-derived words. Importantly, they also included a third set of Hebrew sentences in which the transposition occurred in morphologically simple words from a non-Semitic origin (e.g., agrtl [a vase]).…”

“…In the latter case, there was only a small cost (around 4 %), which was similar to that found with English sentences. Velan and Frost (2011) explained this very small reading cost as indicating that "Hebrew words that are morphologically simple, do not contain a root, and do not have any internal structure, are lexically organized by orthographic neighbourhoods just like base-words in English" (p. 152). In this respect, it is important to note that rootderived words in Hebrew have a "well-defined set of conditional probabilities that rigidly determine few open slots for the consonants of the root only" (Velan & Frost, 2011, p. 153), which implies a "high saliency of the root morpheme" (see Frost, in press, for further discussion).…”

Morphological processing of printed nouns and verbs: Cross-class priming effects

“…This feature might thus be one of those general properties of the human reading system that has been often called for in crosslanguage (cross-script) psycholinguistic research (e.g., Velan & Frost, 2011;Frost, 2012).…”

Parafoveal preprocessing of word initial trigrams during reading in adults and children.

“…This effect has been observed both in adults (e.g., Andrews, 1996;Acha & Perea, 2008b, 2010Bruner & O'Dowd, 1958;Chambers, 1979;Christianson, Johnson, & Rayner, 2005;Forster, Davis, Schoknecht, & Carter, 1987;García-Orza, Perea, & Muñoz, 2010;Holmes & Ng, 1993;Johnson & Dunne, 2012;Kinoshita & Norris, 2009;Lupker, Perea, & Davis, 2008;O'Connor & Forster, 1981;Perea & Acha, 2009b;Perea & Carreiras, 2006a, 2006b, 2006cPerea & Lupker, 2003a, 2003bPerea, Mallouh, & Carreiras, 2010;Perea, Duñabeitia, & Carreiras, 2008;Perea & Pérez, 2009;Perea, Winskel, & Ratitamkul, 2012;Schoonbaert & Grainger, 2004;Taft & Van Graan, 1998;Velan & Frost, 2011) and in children (Acha & Perea, 2008a;Castles, Davis, Cavalot, & Forster, 2007;Kohnen & Castles, 2013;Lété & Fayol, 2013;Paterson, Read, McGowan, & Jordan, 2015;Perea & Estévez, 2008;TiffinRichards & Schroeder, 2015). Transposed letter effects have also been reported for silent sentence reading (see Acha & Perea, 2008b;Blythe, Johnson, Liversedge, & Rayner, 2014;Johnso...…”