J Psycholinguist Res (2006) 35:267–283 DOI 10.1007/s10936-006-9015-x ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Processing Unpointed Hebrew: What Can We Learn from Determining the Identicalness of Monosyllabic and Bisyllabic Nouns Paul Miller
Published online: 14 April 2006 © Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2006
Abstract The aim of this study was to determine whether Hebrew readers reference phonological information for the silent processing of unpointed Hebrew nouns. A research paradigm in which participants were required to perform consecutive same/different judgments regarding the identicalness of members of stimulus pairs was used for answering this question. Twenty-eight students (mean grade 4.9) participated in the study. The nouns used in preparing the word stimulus pairs were comprised of various amounts of syllabic information (monosyllabic versus bisyllabic) and differed in the degree this information was represented by their letter graphemes. The main findings suggest that the processing of the identicalness of unpointed Hebrew words may not involve the referencing of their phonological information. Keywords Reading · Unpointed Hebrew · Level of processing · Phonological processing · Orthographic processing Introduction The reliance on phonological code for the mediation of information in the working memory (WM) has probably been most widely studied in relation to the processing of written words. In particular, with regard to the process of reading in alphabetic orthographies, the view that phonological processing is a conditio sine qua non for proficient reading is currently enjoying rather wide support (Van Orden 1987; Van Orden, Johnston, & Hale 1988; Van Orden et al. 1992; Share 1995, 1999; Snow, Burns, & Griffin 1998; Tan & Perfetti 1998; Ehri, 1999; Perfetti & Sandak, 2000; Report of the National Reading Panel 2000). Phonological processing, according to this position, is an integral component of most ordinary reading, a mandatory stage that serves as the cornerstone for word identification (Frost 1998). Proponents of a phonological reading theory view phonological processing as the gateway to written words’ meanings (see, e.g., Van Orden et al. 1992; Frost 1998; Ehri 1999). Other researchers, however, have taken a somewhat different standpoint in this regard. They P. Miller (B) Department of Education, University of Haifa, Haifa 31905, Israel E-mail:
[email protected] Tel.: +972-4-8249123; Fax: +972-4-8240911
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propose the existence of additional routes, aside from one that relies upon written words’ phonology, for mediating the recognition and identification of written words (see, e.g., Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, & Patterson 1996; Jackson & Coltheart 2001). In their view, orthographic knowledge, acquired through repetitive exposure to written words eventually becomes directly associated with specific semantics and assumes a mediating function in reading. Accordingly, both phonological and orthographical knowledge provide, in principle, a basis for the efficient processing of written words. However, the degree of reliance on either of these strategies may vary according to factors such as reading competence, reading context, word familiarity, spelling regularity, etc. Moreover, some orthographies may have intrinsic characteristics that predetermine how they are most efficiently processed. The goal of the present study was to elucidate the spontaneous reading-strategy used by readers in reading isolated words in one such orthography, unpointed Hebrew. Written Hebrew, because it implements the alphabetic principle in a rather unusual way, has attracted much scientific interest during the past two decades. Unlike other alphabetic orthographies where the graphemes representing consonants and vowels of words are merged into sequential letter strings, in written Hebrew a significant part of the vowel information is depicted not by letter graphemes, but by small, physically dissociated diacritical marks (points and dashes), normally placed below or above their consonantal letter string of the words (for more information, see, Shimron 1993; Share & Levin 1999). This method of vowelization in Hebrew is called ‘pointing’. For example, the Hebrew word for ‘book’ is 1 (SeFeR2 ). This CVCVC string is written as a string of three consonant letters, with an e-vowel being pointed below the first and second consonantal letter of the word. In addition to pointing, Hebrew also uses some letter graphemes, called ‘mothers of reading’, as designators of vowel information (e.g., the letters [Aleph], [Hey], [Vav], [Yod]). Unlike vowel diacritics, which are spatially dissociated, mothers of reading are integrated into the consonantal letter string (e.g., the letter , standing for the phoneme ‘e’ ’ [café]). The value of mothers of reading for the designation of in the Hebrew noun ‘ vowel information of words is somewhat limited, however, since in many instances, one and the same mother of reading is used to designate different vowels (e.g., in the Hebrew noun [mapa], the letter designates the phoneme ‘a’ whereas in the noun [café] it designates the phoneme ‘e’). Therefore, in the absence of complementary information from vowel diacritics or adequate grammatical knowledge on the part of the reader, the majority of mothers of reading remain ambiguous with regard to the vowel information they convey in unpointed Hebrew. Pointing, in principle, makes pointed Hebrew a shallow orthography that permits the phonological decoding of written words in a quite straightforward manner by virtue of converting their graphemes (letters and pointing) into phonemes (Shimron 1993). It is therefore quite surprising that pointing is omitted almost completely3 in reading materials above the third grade level. In its unpointed version, for example, the Hebrew word (SeFeR) is written as (S-F-R4 ). The application of grapheme-to-phoneme conversion rules to such letter strings necessarily outputs phonologically incomplete forms. As a consequence, reading 1 Hebrew is read from the right to the left. 2 The e’s stand for the pointed vowel information. 3 Although above grade level three, the Hebrew reader reads (and produces) almost exclusively unpointed
text, some documents, like biblical text, poetry, etc., are always printed in pointed style to guarantee precise pronunciation. 4 The dashes between the consonantal letters indicate not designated vowel information, the result of omitting the word’s vowel diacritics.
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unpointed Hebrew involves a deep orthography wherein words, particularly when presented out of context, may not be easily and unequivocally identified. This is particularly true for words that, following the omission of pointing, remain ambiguous homographs (e.g., the unpointed word reads as BOOK, COUNT, HAIR DRESSER, etc.). During the last two decades, researchers studying the reading process in Hebrew have made a substantial effort towards determining the role of phonological processing in the reading of pointed and unpointed Hebrew. Indeed, several researchers (Navon & Shimron 1982; Shimron & Navon 1982; Miller 2002a) have shown that manipulating the phonetic value of the vowel diacritics (pointing) of non-homographic Hebrew words impacts their processing. The fact that such manipulations of the vowel diacritics were not detrimental when they did not cause an alternation in the phonology of the target words suggests that pointed Hebrew words become phonologically decoded during their processing (Navon & Shimron 1982; Shimron & Navon 1982; Miller 2002a). The question of whether phonological processing is a default strategy for the reading of unpointed Hebrew as well has, so far, not received a decisive answer. The main reason for this is certainly assignable to the fact that the majority of studies that addressed this question did not do so in a direct manner. In other words, assumptions regarding the processing of unpointed Hebrew were drawn mainly from experiments that compared specific parameters of reading under pointed conditions (vowel diacritics presented) with reading under unpointed conditions (vowel diacritics omitted). The central assumption of this line of research is that, if phonological mediation is crucial for the efficient reading of Hebrew, designating (pointing) the vowel information of Hebrew words should enhance both speed and accuracy of reading. Evidence attained, however, only partly supported this theory. In some studies investigating the voiced reading of connected text, pointed Hebrew text was indeed found to be read faster and more accurately than unpointed text (Eshel 1985; H. Morhayim 1988, unpublished data). However, another line of research has shown that when presented in isolation, the naming latencies for pointed and unpointed Hebrew nouns did not significantly differ (Navon & Shimron 1982; Shimron & Navon 1982). Moreover, there is a rather large body of evidence that failed to establish a pointing effect in reading tasks that did not require voicing the text (Bentin, Bargai, & Katz 1984; Navon & Shimron, 1985; Bentin & Frost 1987; Shimron & Sivan 1994; Even 1995, unpublished data; Frost 1995; Shimron 1999; Nahmani-Ronen 2000; Miller 2002a, b), although there may be some differences in this regard between normal readers and readers with impoverished reading skills (see Miller 2002b, 2004a) or readers for whom Hebrew is the second language (Abu-Rabia 2001). But, of course, it remains rather speculative inferring the nature of the reading strategy used for the processing of unpointed Hebrew from the comparison of reading under pointed and unpointed conditions. On the other hand, the number of studies that directly manipulated the phonological properties of unpointed Hebrew words for elucidating the role of phonology in their processing is strikingly small in the literature. In one such study (Frost 1995), participants were asked to name unpointed written words or to judge their lexicality. The word stimuli varied with regard to the amount of not-designated vowel information due to the omission of pointing. Analyses of the data showed that naming speed decreased proportionally to the number of unspecified vowels in the unpointed target words, a naming pattern that is in line with an assumption that phonological coding has a mediating function in the voiced reading of unpointed Hebrew. Interestingly, in the same study there was no evidence that the amount of unspecified vowel information impacted the making of a lexical decision. Intuitively, this absence seems to suggest that proficient readers do not reference phonological information for deciding whether or not a letter string is a word. Yet, as has
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been claimed by Frost (1998), it may be that the phonological recoding of unpointed Hebrew letter strings generates sufficiently detailed phonological information for activating (some) underspecified interface-access-representations of lexical entries in the mental lexicon as the basis for making a lexical decision. In other words, because in such access representation the addressed information in the phonological and phonetic structure of words is assumed to be reduced to a relevant minimum—in the case of unpointed Hebrew mainly to consonantal information—it should be possible to make lexical decisions even if the phonological decoding of letter strings based on a grapheme-to-phoneme conversion procedure does not generate their fully-detailed phonological form. The involvement and specification of phonological code in the processing of unpointed Hebrew words was directly tested in a backward masking paradigm where participants were asked to write down target words that were briefly exposed and then immediately concealed by a mask (Gronau & Frost 1997). The masking stimulus was a pseudo-word that varied in the degree of its phonological or graphemic similarity to the target word. Findings showed that the target words followed by a phonologically and graphemically similar pseudo-word mask were spelled more accurately than words followed by masks that were either graphemically only similar or graphemically and phonemically dissimilar pseudo-words. This advantage was interpreted as evidence for the occurrence of prelexical, phonological recoding in the processing of unpointed Hebrew. Moreover, because the facilitating effect on spelling accuracy of phonologically minimally differing masks was not notably different, it was concluded that the processing of unpointed Hebrew is based upon phonologically underspecified representation. The conclusions drawn from the above study may, however, not be generalizable because the instruction to write down the perceived words may well have biased the testees toward the use of a strategy that best fits task requirements, a strategy they would not necessarily have used if they were asked only to read the words silently. It also seems possible that the extremely brief exposure to the stimulus (typical for [backward] masking paradigms) compels the reading system of an individual to take a route in processing written words that deviates from the one it would have taken under more natural reading conditions. Therefore, the use of a paradigm that neither dictates a particular reading strategy, nor artificially limits time for processing a stimulus, may help shed further light on the nature of the processing strategy used by the Hebrew reader for the reading of unpointed Hebrew words. The findings reported in this paper represent the results obtained from such a paradigm. A model whereby the determination of the physical identicalness between two written words ( [DOG DOG]) is opposed to the determination of the conventional identicalness of the same words ( [DOG dog]) was used in the present experiment as a means for examining whether phonological decoding serves as a default strategy for the processing of unpointed Hebrew words (Share 1995; Frost 1998). Two manipulations regarding the phonological properties of words were combined, one related to the amounts of phonological information comprising the word stimuli (monosyllabic versus bisyllabic) and another related to the completeness by which the information of words is represented at the grapheme level (see Frost 1995). It was assumed that, if the words of a word pair are presented each in a different writing style—one in print and one in cursive script—judging their identicalness would necessitate some additional processing that neutralizes typescript-related differences (see, e.g., Cocoran & Rouse 1970; see also De Zuniga, Humphreys, & Evett 1991) to make them directly comparable. One option would be to decode the words phonologically, a strategy that relies on the retrieval of conventionalized phonological knowledge regarding corresponding sound(s) of letter graphemes and/or whole words.
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Logically, the process of phonological decoding is expected to be biased by the phonological properties of the decoded words, such as the number of their composing syllables, but also by the completeness by which their phonology is represented at the grapheme level. Accordingly, it was hypothesized that, if for determining their identicalness unpointed Hebrew words are phonologically decoded, than the bisyllabic word pairs used for stimulation in the present study would be processed more slowly than the monosyllabic word pairs. Such a slow-down was not only expected because the bisyllabic words used were composed of greater amounts of phonological information, but also because this information was less completely depicted at the grapheme level, making the processing of the bisyllabic words via their phonological decoding less effective (see Frost 1995). In instances where determining the identicalness of two written words is possible based upon their visual properties (i.e., or ), making a decision regarding their identicalness may not require the accessing of conventionalized knowledge such as the words’ phonology. Therefore, it was expected that, in the present study, determining the identicalness of physically identical (PI) word pairs would be faster than determining the identicalness of conventionally only identical (CI)5 word pairs. It was further hypothesized that, because accessing conventionalized knowledge may not be required in such instances, the phonological properties of the word stimuli—the amount of syllabic information and the quality of its representation at the grapheme level—would not bias the process of making of an identicalness decision.
Method Participants Thirty primary school students (Fourth–Sixth grade) from a public school serving a middle class population participated in the experiment. For all of them, spoken Hebrew was their mother tongue. They all had intact or corrected to normal vision, and proper hearing. None of them was diagnosed as having a particular learning disability. According to their teachers, the reading comprehension skills of all the students tested were average and higher. The data of two students was excluded from statistical analyses because their performance time on some of the experimental measures was more than one and a half standard deviations below the norm. The mean grade of the remaining participants was 4.9 (SD=1.02). Stimuli and design In the present experiment participants were required to repetitively perform consecutive, rapid, same/different judgments on 40 word pairs, half of which were comprised of two identical Hebrew words and the remainder of two distinct Hebrew words. The word pairs were randomly distributed within 40 rectangular fields, arranged in five rows on an A3 sheet; with each row comprising eight fields (see Appendix A). Participants were required to mark (using a pencil) fields with word pairs comprising the same word with the sign , and word pairs composed of two distinct words with the sign , beginning from the right upper
5 The terms ‘conventional identity’, ‘conventionally identical’ and the abbreviation ‘CI’ used throughout this manuscript refer to an identicalness between two words that is not perceived directly at the perceptual level, but that has to be established post-perceptually by means of some form of knowledge.
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corner of the test sheet, and proceeding from right to left,6 row after row, until they finished marking all the word pairs. They were instructed that, if they made a mistake, not to correct themselves. Both performance time (in seconds) and accuracy measures were recorded for subsequent analyses. For task explanation and warm-up, a practice sheet containing two rows of stimulus pairs was used. For elucidating the nature of the reading strategy used by the participants for the processing of the identicalness of words comprising a stimulus pair, the present experiment used an altered (extended) version of a paradigm used by Frost (1995) for examining the involvement of phonological processing in the reading of unpointed Hebrew. In that study, Frost manipulated the degree to which the letter graphemes of unpointed Hebrew words specified their phonological properties in the absence of pointing. Results from a naming experiment based on this methodology revealed a decrease in naming speed proportional to the number of unspecified vowels in the unpointed target words. In the present study, altering the degree to which the letter graphemes of unpointed Hebrew words represent their phonology was combined with two additional manipulations, one controlling the amount of phonological information of the words and another, determining the optimal level of their processing. It was expected that the combination of these manipulations would magnify processing differences rooted in the phonological processing of the stimulus materials, and would be helpful in determining the automaticity and level of its occurrence. The experiment included four conditions, each condition being tested by a separate experimental sheet. In two of these conditions, the word pairs the participants were asked to judge were prepared from monosyllabic words (M), whereas in the other two, bisyllabic words (B) were used for this purpose. In one condition of each of these phonological categories, the two words comprising a word-pair were both printed in identical typescript (print or cursive). As a result, the identical word pairs presented in these conditions were PI as the word-pairs or . On the remaining sheet of each phonological condition, the words comprising a word pair appeared in two different typescripts (one print and one cursive) as the word-pairs or . As a result, the words comprising identical word-pairs were in these instances not physically identical, but only CI. Appendix B provides detailed information on the stimuli used for preparing the four experimental conditions. In all the experimental conditions using monosyllabic words, the letter graphemes almost completely specified the phonological properties of the words, as exemplified by the Hebrew noun [DLI]. This was the case even though these words were presented without pointing. It was assumed that such an optimal specification (OS) of the phonology of words at the graphemic level would facilitate their processing. In contrast, in the two conditions using bisyllabic words, the representation of the phonological information of the words at the graphemic level was, due to the absence of vowel diacritics, always significantly underspecified (US), as exemplified by the bisyllabic Hebrew letter string (Y-L-D). As a result, relative to determining the identicalness of words in the monosyllabic conditions, determining the identicalness of words in the two bisyllabic conditions was expected to be delayed. This was expected not only because the latter consisted of significantly more phonological information, but also because their judgment required some additional processing for disambiguating phonological information that was US (not fully detailed) at the grapheme level (see Appendix B).
6 The reason for doubling the stimulus pairs was a lack of three letter sequences that permit the creation of
both a monosyllabic and a bisyllabic Hebrew word.
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The stimulus pairs appearing in the four experimental conditions were prepared using ten monosyllabic and ten bisyllabic Hebrew words. An additional pool of words was used for explanation and practice. All the words used to build the word-pairs of the four experimental conditions had three letter graphemes. The same three letters used to prepare a monosyllabic word (e.g., the letter string [DLI]) were also used to create a paralleling bisyllabic word (e.g., [Y-L-D]). As a result, the graphemic information used for building the words used in the monosyllabic conditions was identical with that used for preparing the words used in the bisyllabic conditions, whereas the amount of the phonological information referenced by the graphemes of bisyllabic words was twice the amount of that referenced by the monosyllabic words. Moreover, as already mentioned, the phonological information of monosyllabic words was specified by their letter graphemes more completely than was the phonological information of bisyllabic words. The procedure underlying the preparation of the four experimental sheets, each sheet representing one of the four experimental conditions, included three basic steps. In the first step, ten identical and ten non-identical word pairs were prepared using each of the ten monosyllabic words and the ten bisyllabic words, yielding a total of 20 word-pairs for each of these phonological categories. In the second step, two typescript versions were created for both the monosyllabic and the bisyllabic word-pair pools. In the first version, the PI version, both members of a word-pair were always presented in one and the same typescript, with the words in half of the word-pairs appearing in print and in the remainder in handwriting. In the second version, the CI version, each of the words in a word-pair appeared in a different typescript, one in print and the other in handwriting. In all, preparation steps 1 and 2 created four experimental conditions labeled as follows: (a). monosyllabic, optimally specified, physically identical (MOS-PI); (b). monosyllabic, optimally specified, conventionally identical (MOS-CI); (c). bisyllabic, underspecified, physically identical (BUS-PI); (d). bisyllabic, underspecified, conventionally identical (BUS-CI). In the third and last step, the 20 word-pairs of each of the four stimulus pools were doubled6 and then randomly distributed into the 40 fields of an experimental sheet. A detailed description of the four stimulus conditions is presented in Appendix B. All the words used were well within the active vocabulary of the participants. Further, the average word frequency of the items in both syllabic categories was about the same, namely 142 occurrences for monosyllabic words and 149 occurrences for bisyllabic words in a sample of 400,000 words [according to Balgur (1968)]. Procedure So as to counteract a learning effect, the order of test sheets of the four experimental conditions was rotated between participants. The participants were tested individually. The experimenter7 first placed a practice sheet corresponding to a specific experimental condition in front of the participants. He then addressed the participants as follows: “This is a very simple task. All you have to do is indicate fields containing the same noun twice with the mark and fields with two distinct words with the mark ”. The experimenter exemplified the instructions by correctly indicating the word-pairs in the first four fields of the practice sheet. He then asked the participants to continue the marking until the end of the sheet. After the performance of the participants on the practice sheet demonstrated that they correctly understood the task, the experimenter moved on to administer the experimental sheet(s). 7 The experimenter was an MA student specifically hired to carry out the present experiment; he was neither involved in the planning of the experiment nor was he aware of the research hypotheses tested.
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Table 1 Experiment 1: mean performance timesa for the judgment of mono/bisyllabic Hebrew nouns under PI and CI conditions (Standard Deviations in parentheses) Amount of syllables
Monosyllabic words Bisyllabic words
Type of identity Physical identity
Conventional identity
45.55 (8.40) 44.84 (9.10)
54.31 (7.32) 52.44 (7.95)
Note. a Measurements in seconds
The experimenter replaced the practice sheet with one of the test sheets (according to rotation order), which was covered by an empty sheet. He informed the participants that the test sheet contained five rows of fields with noun pairs they would have to mark as practiced before. The participants were told that this time they should work as quickly as possible because time would be measured from the moment they mark the first field. The participants were reminded that they should start indicating the fields from the upper right corner, always proceeding from the right to the left,8 field by field, row by row, until they reach the end. The experimenter also instructed the participants not to correct themselves in case they err. The participants were then asked whether they were ready for testing. When the participants confirmed their readiness, the experimenter instructed them to place their hand holding the pencil close to the right-upper corner of the cover sheet, so it would be ready for marking, and to concentrate. He then removed the cover sheet from the test sheet at once and activated a stopwatch the moment the participants marked their decision on the first field. Timing was stopped when the participants marked the last word pair. None of the participants demonstrated problems understanding or performing the task.
Results For reasons of simplicity, the term “phonological effect” will be used throughout the Results section to refer to the (assumed) combined, cumulative effect resulting from variation in the amount of the phonological information (monosyllabic versus bisyllabic) and the degree to which this information was represented at the grapheme level (OS/US). The hypotheses of the experiment were tested in two MANOVA analyses, one applied to the participants’ speed of task performance and another analyzing their error rates. In both these analyses, type of identicalness (PI, CI) and phonological properties of words (MOS, BUS) were defined as within-subject factors. In an initial analysis that included “grade level” as a covariate, grade was not found to interact with the two main effects (all F-values < 0.80). Therefore, the findings reported here were attained from a simplified statistical model that ignored grade as an independent variable. The performance times of the participants under the four experimental conditions were analyzed first. Means and standard deviations are summarized in Table 1. As predicted, the effect caused by the type of identity (PI versus CI) was of statistical significance, (F[1, 27] = 134.07, p < 0.001). There was also a significant time difference (F[1, 27] = 5.54, p < 0.05) caused by variation in the phonological properties of the words (MOS versus BUS). Unexpectedly, however, the way the phonological effect impacted on performance time was in the opposite direction as predicted, i.e., determining between-stimulus 8 The direction of indicating the word-pair fields is congruent with the direction of reading in Hebrew.
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identicalness was faster under the BUS conditions than under the MOS conditions. Moreover, analyses did not reveal a statistically significant interaction between the two main effects, suggesting that variation in the phonological properties of the words impacted the performance of the participants under both identicalness conditions (PI, CI) uniformly. The error rates (erroneous indications) of the participants under the different experimental conditions were analyzed, although these were generally very small. Means and standard deviations are summarized in Table 2. As for performance time, type of identicalness significantly impacted the accuracy of the same/different judgments made by the participants (F[1, 27] = 18.18, p < 0.001), with more erroneous decisions being made under CI conditions. The effect on decision accuracy caused by the phonological properties of the words was of borderline significance only (F[1, 27] = 3.40, p = 0.07). As can be seen from Table 2, there was some trend of erroneous decisions being more numerous for bisyllabic word pairs than for monosyllabic word pairs. Yet the absence of a significant interaction between the two main effects indicated that this trend was not linked to the processing of a specific type of identicalness. Discussion The present experiment was designed to pinpoint the nature of the word decoding strategies Hebrew readers spontaneously use for the processing of unpointed Hebrew words. The paradigm used for this purpose, requiring participants to deliver rapid same/different judgments for word pairs, manipulated two aspects of the word stimulus pairs. The first manipulation caused the participants to judge the identicalness of the same word pairs twice, once when their members appeared in the same typescript (PI) and once when they were presented in two different typescripts (CI). It was hypothesized that processing would be significantly faster and more accurate under PI conditions than under CI conditions. Findings showed that, indeed, PI word pairs were judged significantly faster and with greater accuracy than the CI word pairs. Particularly with regard to the speed of processing of the word pairs, this effect was strikingly robust (8–10 s). The fact that this finding characterized both the word pairs of the MOS category (monosyllabic words) and the BUS category (bisyllabic words) indicates that determining identicalness in CI word pairs principally required some additional processing for converting their members into a state that permitted their comparison. The significant increases in performance time as well as in error rate characterizing the performance of the participants under CI conditions suggests that, as predicted, processing the identicalness of words under these conditions required the retrieval of some kind of conceptual knowledge for bridging typescript-related, perceptual differences. In view of the central role assigned to phonology in the processing of written words (Share, 1995; Snow,
Table 2 Experiment 1: mean error ratesa for the judgment of mono/bisyllabic Hebrew nouns under PI and CI conditions (standard deviations in parentheses) Amount of syllables
Monosyllabic words Bisyllabic words Note. a Maximum 40 errors per condition
Type of identity Physical identity
Conventional identity
0.18 (0.71) 0.29 (0.54)
0.79 (0.96) 1.11 (0.89)
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Burns, & Griffin, 1998; Perfetti & Sandak 2000; see also Report of the National Reading Panel, 2000) and in line with a claim that phonological decoding is a spontaneous, involuntary response to the encounter of written words’ graphemes (Shimron 1993; Frost 1998), it was assumed that, in the present experiment, the nature of the conceptual knowledge the participants would recruit for mediating the identicalness of words in CI word pairs would be phonological. Therefore, it was predicted that varying the amount of the phonological information of the words and the degree to which this information is represented at their grapheme level (MOS versus BUS) would impact determining their identicalness, particularly when presented under CI conditions. In other words, it was hypothesized that, if it is phonology that mediates the processing of the identicalness of two unpointed Hebrew words, BUS-CI word pairs would be processed significantly slower than MOS-CI word pairs. This would be true not only because, for determining their identicalness, the reader had to process greater amounts of phonological information, but also because, in the present experiment, the phonological information of BUS-CI word pairs was only incompletely specified at the grapheme level, a fact that has already been reported elsewhere to negatively bias the phonological decoding of unpointed Hebrew words (see Frost 1995). Findings revealed from this experiment show that MOS-CI and BUS-CI word pairs were indeed processed at a different rate. However, contrary to expectations, participants were significantly faster in indicating the between-word identicalness in sheets containing BUS-CI word pairs than in sheets containing MOS-CI word pairs. This finding is rather surprising given that, in determining the identicalness of the former, participants had to process twice the amount of phonological information (160 syllables) than in determining the identicalness of the latter (80 syllables). This counterintuitive performance pattern becomes even more puzzling in view of the fact that, according to a strong phonological reading theory (Frost 1998), the monosyllabic word pairs used in the present experiment should have been processed faster simply because their composing graphemes depicted their phonological information more completely than did the graphemes of the bisyllabic words (Frost 1995). It is hard to explain in the present experiment why bisyllabic words, in spite of their phonologically disadvantageous properties, were still processed more efficiently than monosyllabic words. This contradiction actually calls into question whether the participants indeed relied on a phonological strategy for processing the identicalness of the unpointed Hebrew words. Considering their performance patterns under the different experimental conditions, the answer to this question seems to be negative. Regrettably, however, the findings revealed from analyzing the responses of the participants to the manipulations made in the present experiment are not sufficient for inferring the definite nature of the knowledge the participants used for determining the identicalness of two perceptually distinct words directly. Findings only show that such knowledge was accessed and that, when used for mediating the between-stimulus identicalness in word pairs, it apparently did not make reference to the phonological properties of the words. Aside from a phonological strategy, there are at least two other strategies that participants could have used to resolve the identicalness of two CI words. One of these strategies uses orthographic knowledge as a mediator and another, semantic knowledge. Findings attained from the phonological manipulations performed in the present experiment failed to directly pinpoint any one of these strategies as the favored candidate. Reconsidering the stimulus material in retrospect, there are, however, several points that seem to give the strategy based on orthographic knowledge a clear lead. The first of these points is the way the existence of homography impacted the performance of the participants. In Hebrew, omitting pointing unavoidably turns many written words into homographs representing multiple meanings. This was also the case in the present study. As can be seen
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from Appendix B, due to the phonological underspecifications resulting from the absence of vowel diacritics (pointing), the words used for building the stimulus pairs in the BUS category were predominantly homographs. This is in contrast to the words used for preparing the words pairs of the MOS category, for which omitting pointing did not normally create homography. Because for homography to have an impact upon determining the identicalness of two words these words would have to be processed semantically, the disparity regarding the existence of homography in the two phonological categories seems to have particular potential for clarifying whether the participants used a semantic strategy for this purpose. More specifically, homography, because it activates multiple meanings, should have led to a slowdown in processing word pairs from the BUS category, relative to processing of word pairs from the MOS category, which mostly were not homographs. Yet, in this study, the word pairs from the BUS category were processed significantly faster. This suggests that the speed of processing discrepancy found between the BUS and the MOS categories was not rooted in a discrepancy regarding their homographic status. In other words, participants seemingly did not process the words down to a semantic level that would have turned the homography dimension into a relevant factor for their processing. Otherwise, not only would the speed of processing discrepancy found for the two categories have been reversed, but under PI conditions, such a discrepancy would not have been expected to occur. A second point that argues that participants used orthographic knowledge rather than semantic knowledge for resolving the identicalness of CI words is the fact that they processed word pairs under PI conditions notably faster. Assuming that processing time is indicative of how deeply a stimulus is processed, this time discrepancy actually indicates that participants made their decisions at the level of processing on which such identicalness was first effortlessly recognized, a line of interpretation suggested also by the remarkably low error rate. For word pairs presented under CI conditions, the optimal level for making a decision was reached the moment the letter strings of the words became orthographically processed. It seems reasonable to assume that, as was the case for word pairs presented under PI conditions, for making their decision, the participants did not process the CI word pairs further, although, in principal, they could have done so. The finding that, under both PI and CI conditions, word pairs from the MOS category were processed significantly more slowly in comparison to word pairs from the BUS category seems to rule out that the participants relied on phonological or semantic knowledge for determining their identicalness. Whereas this finding makes orthographic knowledge the leading candidate in explaining how participants in the present study mediated the identicalness of two physically nonidentical words, it by no means answers why there was, after all, a time discrepancy between the processing of word pairs from the two phonological categories (MOS versus BUS), why it was in the opposite direction, and why it was found also under the PI condition. A possible explanation for these phenomena would be that they reflect variance at the word frequency level. The fact that the words used to create bisyllabic word pairs were, on the average, slightly more frequent than those used to prepare the monosyllabic word pairs indeed gives some credence to this possibility. Yet, taking this possibility into closer consideration, one should keep in mind that the same counterintuitive effect found for processing the two word categories under the CI condition was also found under the PI condition. In view of the rapid processing of such stimulus pairs, in conjunction with the fact that, in this condition, retrieving lexical knowledge was not a prerequisite for determining between-stimulus identicalness, an explanation that postulates variance in word frequency as the origin of the MOS/BUS effect does not seem to be defendable.
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Searching for a plausible alternative to a word-frequency hypothesis necessarily calls for turning attention to early stages in the processing of the stimulus material. It seems possible, for example, that even though the average word frequencies of the two word lists used for preparing the word stimulus pairs of the MOS and the BUS categories was comparable, particular, intrinsic perceptual features of the words’ graphemic information and/or the typescript(s) in which they were realized may still have facilitated the processing (of some) of the words used for preparing the latter. If this line of reasoning is correct, it necessarily would lead to the conclusion that the counterintuitive processing pattern found for the two phonological word categories at both the PI level and the CI level reflects variance in the perceptual processibility of the word pairs, rather than conceptual constraints related to the lexical and/or semantic status of the words used for their preparation. Such an explanation would also reasonably explain why the same processing pattern was found at both processing levels (PI and CI). In sum, in the present experiment, for determining the identicalness of two word stimuli, participants could, in principal, rely upon different kinds of knowledge such as phonological knowledge, orthographic knowledge, and/or semantic knowledge. Yet notwithstanding the fact that the paradigm used did not impose a particular processing strategy, findings regarding the lack of sensitivity of the participants to the phonological and semantic properties of the target word stimuli indicate that their processing strategy did not rely upon referencing these types of knowledge. In view of such insensitivity to phonology and semantics of words, assuming that it was orthographic knowledge that served participants for mediating the identicalness of written words in instances where this could not be achieved based upon their visual appearance makes sense. Yet because the present experiment did not include manipulations that systematically affected the orthographic properties of the words, this conclusion should be read with some caution and will have to be further substantiated in future research investigating orthographic processing more directly. Such research is particularly warranted because findings revealed by the present experiment contradict the currently widely held view that phonology plays a central role in the processing of written words, including unpointed Hebrew. The present study seems to pinpoint orthographic processing as the default strategy for the reading of unpointed Hebrew. This, however, does not necessarily imply that the Hebrew reader does not also focus on other dimensions of written text as reading requirements change. It seems, for example, reasonable to assume that, when asked to read aloud, the reading system is tuned towards the phonological properties of words. Therefore, the finding that in naming tasks, Hebrew readers have been found to be sensitive to the phonological properties of unpointed Hebrew words (Frost 1995) is rather expected and actually does not contradict the findings from the present study. A similar switch to a more phonologically based reading strategy also makes sense following the requirement to write down briefly presented, unpointed Hebrew words (Gronau & Frost 1997). Yet, considering the reaction of Hebrew readers to phonological manipulations in experimental designs that did not impose particular attention to words phonology, such as making a lexical decision (Frost 1995), or the judging of the identicalness of two visually distinct words (present study), it appears that, in reading unpointed Hebrew, the attention resources of the reader are not automatically tuned towards the phonological properties of words (Shimron 1993), but such a tuning seems to occur only in instances where phonological decoding is purposeful. This actually would suggest that within the reading system, written information is processed along pathways that are optimal for the goal of reading (see also Miller 2004b), a line of reasoning that is also suggested by the performance of the participants under PI and CI conditions in the present experiment.
responses
Note. a The format of the experimental sheet is reduced in size (A4 instead of A3 format) b The ’s and ’s were not indicated on the original experimental sheet, but serve merely as an illustration of task requirements
Appendix A Example of the research toola : Sheet used for testing Condition 1 (MOS-PI) - monosyllabic, physically identical
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Appendix B The four conditions of the experiment: The monosyllabic and bisyllabic Hebrew word-pairs used and their transcription
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Note. a Both word stimuli of the pair appear either in print or in cursive style b One word stimuli of the pair is in print and the other in cursive script c Homographic letter string presented with their most frequent meaning
Appendix B (continued)
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