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Morphological Decomposition in Reading Hebrew Homographs

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Abstract

The present work investigates whether and how morphological decomposition processes bias the reading of Hebrew heterophonic homographs, i.e., unique orthographic patterns that are associated with two separate phonological, semantic entities depicted by means of two morphological structures (linear and nonlinear). In order to reveal the nature of morphological processes involved in the reading of Hebrew homographs, we tested 146 university students with three computerized experiments, each experiment focusing on a different level of processing. Participants were divided into three experimental groups given that the three experiments used the same stimulus lists. Evidence obtained from the analysis of the participants’ processing time and processing accuracy points to a propensity to process heterophonic homographs by default as morpho-syntactically simple rather than complex words. Findings are discussed with reference to assumptions made by Dual-Route models regarding the importance of morphological knowledge in fast and accurate access of written words’ representations which mediate the retrieval of their meanings with direct reference to the context in which they occur.

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Notes

  1. The letter ‘C’ depicts the consonants of the root morpheme whereas the letter ‘e’ represents the word’s vocalic (vowel) pattern.

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Ethical standard

The university students participating in the study were tested only after providing them with information regarding the nature of the study and getting their explicit consent. In sum, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the research reported in the manuscript adheres to principles of ethical responsibilities and is in compliance with the ethical standards outlaid by COPE.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Special Education, University of Haifa, Haifa, 31905, Israel

    Paul Miller & Batel Liran-Hazan

  2. The Edmond J. Safra Brain Research Center for the Study of Learning Disabilities, University of Haifa, Haifa, 31905, Israel

    Paul Miller

  3. Department of Education, Western Galilee College, Acre, 24121, Israel

    Vered Vaknin

  4. Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Haifa, 31905, Israel

    Vered Vaknin

Authors
  1. Paul Miller
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  2. Batel Liran-Hazan
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  3. Vered Vaknin
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Paul Miller.

Appendices

Appendix 1: Experimental Stimuli Naming Task

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Appendix 2: Experimental Stimuli for Primed Naming and Semantic Decision Tasks

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Miller, P., Liran-Hazan, B. & Vaknin, V. Morphological Decomposition in Reading Hebrew Homographs. J Psycholinguist Res 45, 717–738 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-015-9364-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-015-9364-4

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