ERIC Number: EJ853989
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2009-Oct
Pages: 18
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0749-596X
EISSN: N/A
Letter-Transposition Effects Are Not Universal: The Impact of Transposing Letters in Hebrew
Velan, Hadas; Frost, Ram
Journal of Memory and Language, v61 n3 p285-302 Oct 2009
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. (Contains 6 tables.)
Descriptors: Semitic Languages, Phonemes, Morphemes, Inhibition, Word Recognition, Experiments, Phoneme Grapheme Correspondence, Phonology, Language Processing, Priming, Orthographic Symbols, Comparative Analysis, Uncommonly Taught Languages, Language Research
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
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