Eviatar Zohar, Ibrahim Raphiq, Ganayim Deia
Institute of Information Processing and Decision Making, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
Neuropsychology. 2004 Jan;18(1):174-84. doi: 10.1037/0894-4105.18.1.174.
Hebrew and Arabic are Semitic languages with a similar morphological structure and orthographies that differ in visual complexity. Two experiments explored the interaction of the characteristics of orthography and hemispheric abilities on lateralized versions of a letter-matching task (Experiment 1) and a global-local task (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, native Hebrew readers and native Arabic readers fluent in Hebrew matched letters in the 2 orthographies. The results support the hypothesis that Arabic orthography is more difficult than Hebrew orthography for participants who can read both languages and that this difficulty has its strongest effects in the left visual field. In Experiment 2, native Arabic speakers performed a global-local letter detection task with Arabic letters with 2 types of inconsistent stimuli: different and similar. The results support the hypothesis that the right hemisphere of skilled Arabic readers cannot distinguish between similar Arabic letters, whereas the left hemisphere can.
希伯来语和阿拉伯语属于闪含语系，具有相似的形态结构和拼写方式，只是视觉复杂度有所不同。两项实验探究了拼写特征与半球能力在字母匹配任务（实验1）和全局-局部任务（实验2）的不同版本中的交互作用。在实验1中，以希伯来语为母语的读者以及精通希伯来语的以阿拉伯语为母语的读者对两种拼写方式中的字母进行匹配。结果支持了这样的假设：对于两种语言都能阅读的参与者而言，阿拉伯语拼写比希伯来语拼写更难，且这种难度在左视野中影响最为强烈。在实验2中，以阿拉伯语为母语的人对带有两种不一致刺激类型（不同和相似）的阿拉伯字母执行全局-局部字母检测任务。结果支持了这样的假设：熟练的阿拉伯语读者的右半球无法区分相似的阿拉伯字母，而左半球则可以。
