Velan Hadas, Frost Ram
The Hebrew University Jerusalem, Israel.
J Mem Lang. 2009 Oct 1;61(3):285-302. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2009.05.003.
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.
我们在三项掩蔽启动实验中研究了希伯来语中字母换位的影响。希伯来语和英语一样，采用字母拼写体系，连续的字母串代表音素。然而，作为一种闪米特语，它具有基于词根派生的非连接形态。实验1表明，换位字母（TL）词根启动抑制了对源自未换位词根字母的目标的反应，并且这种抑制与相对词根频率无关。实验2重复了这一结果，并表明如果词根的换位字母形成了一个没有词汇表征的无意义词根，那么就不会得到抑制和促进作用。最后，实验3表明，与英语、法语或西班牙语不同，TL非词启动并没有促进目标识别，并且当其中嵌入的词根字母由合法的词根语素组成时，它们会产生抑制作用。这些结果表明，如果不同语言的形态结构在质上存在差异，那么字母拼写体系中的词汇空间结构可能会有很大不同。在希伯来语中，词汇空间是根据词根家族组织的，而不是简单的拼写结构，因此所有源自同一词根的单词相互连接或聚集在一起，而与整体拼写相似性无关。
