Decomposition in a non-concatenated morphological structure involves more than just the roots: Evidence from fast priming.

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.

The flexibility of letter-position flexibility: evidence from eye movements in reading Hebrew.

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.

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

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.

Letter-transposition effects are not universal: The impact of transposing letters in Hebrew.

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.

Cambridge University versus Hebrew University: the impact of letter transposition on reading English and Hebrew.

Is reading similarly affected by letter transposition in all alphabetic orthographies? "The Cambridge University effect", demonstrating that jumbled letters have little effect on reading, was examined using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) in English and in Hebrew. Hebrew-English bilinguals were presented sentences in both languages containing words with transposed letters. Sentences were presented rapidly on the screen word by word, and participants had to reproduce the sequence of words perceived.