Department of Psychology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
Cognition. 2011 Feb;118(2):141-56. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.11.013. Epub 2010 Dec 15.
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. The experiments contrasted typical Semitic words which are root-derived, with Hebrew words of non-Semitic origin, which are morphologically simple and resemble base-words in European languages. Using RSVP, TL priming, and form-priming manipulations, we show that Hebrew readers process Hebrew words which are morphologically simple similar to the way they process English words. These words indeed reveal the typical form-priming and TL priming effects reported in European languages. In contrast, words with internal structure are processed differently, and require a different code for lexical access. We discuss the implications of these findings for current models of visual word recognition.
最近的研究表明，在印欧语系中作为视觉单词识别标记的基本效应，在希伯来语或阿拉伯语中无法获得。尽管希伯来语像英语、法语或西班牙语一样，采用的是字母书写系统，但一系列研究一致表明，在希伯来语中不存在简单的形态-正字法启动或字母转换启动。在四项实验中，我们检验了这样一个假设，即这是由于闪米特语的词具有一种底层结构，限制了音位及其各自字母的可能对齐。实验对比了源自词根的典型闪米特语词，以及形态简单且类似于欧洲语言基本词的希伯来语非闪米特语源词。使用 RSVP、TL 启动和形态启动操作，我们表明希伯来语读者处理形态简单的希伯来语词的方式类似于他们处理英语词的方式。这些词确实显示出在欧洲语言中报告的典型形态启动和 TL 启动效应。相比之下，具有内部结构的词被以不同的方式处理，并且需要不同的词汇访问代码。我们讨论了这些发现对视觉单词识别的当前模型的影响。
