Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T01:34:30.989Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Morphological analysis in learning to read pseudowords in Hebrew

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 June 2011

AMALIA BAR-ON*
Affiliation:
Tel Aviv University
DORIT RAVID
Affiliation:
Tel Aviv University
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Amalia Bar-On, Department of Communications Disorders, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel. E-mail: amaliaba@zahav.net.il

Abstract

This paper examines the role of morphology in gradeschool children's learning to read nonpointed Hebrew. It presents two experiments testing the reading of morphologically based nonpointed pseudowords. One hundred seventy-one Hebrew-speaking children and adolescents in seven age/schooling groups (beginning and end of 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 7th, and 11th grade) and a group of adults participated in the study. Participants were administered two tasks of reading aloud nonpointed pseudowords with morphological composition: words in isolation and words in sentential context. Results pinpoint the developmental milestones on the way to efficient nonpointed word recognition in Hebrew: learning to use morphological pattern cues to fill in missing phonological information, where second grade is an important “watershed” period; and overcoming homography by learning to detect morphosyntactic cues, an ability that develops more gradually and over a longer period than pattern recognition.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Abu-Rabia, S. (2001). The role of vowels in reading Semitic scripts: Data from Arabic and Hebrew. Reading and Writing, 14, 3959.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Allon, E. (1988). The nikud and early Hebrew reading [in Hebrew]. Be'eri, 1, 143149.Google Scholar
Anderson, S. A. (1992). A-morphous morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Avineri, S. (1976). The palace of patterns [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Dvir.Google Scholar
Baayen, R. H. (2007). Storage and computation in the mental lexicon. In Jarema, G. & Libben, G. (Eds.) The mental lexicon: Core perspectives (pp. 81104). Oxford: Elsevier Science.Google Scholar
Bar-On, A. (2009). The role of linguistic knowledge in learning to read non-voweled Hebrew. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Tel Aviv University.Google Scholar
Bar-On, A. (in press). Linguistic processes in reading non-voweled Hebrew. In Aram, D. & Korat, O. (Eds.), Literacy and language. Jerusalem: Magnes.Google Scholar
Berent, I., & Shimron, J. (1997). The representation of Hebrew words: Evidence from the obligatory contour principle. Cognition, 64, 3972.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Berman, R. (1985). Acquisition of Hebrew. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Berman, R. A. (1987). Productivity in the lexicon: New-word formation in Modern Hebrew. Folia Linguistica, 21, 225254.Google Scholar
Berman, R. A. (2003). Children's lexical innovations: Developmental perspectives on Hebrew verb-structure. In Shimron, J. (Ed.), Language processing and acquisition in languages of Semitic, root-based morphology (pp. 243291). Amsterdam: Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berman, R. A. (2008). The psycholinguistics of developing text construction. Journal of Child Language, 35, 735771.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bolozky, S. (1997). Israeli Hebrew phonology. In Kaye, A. S. (Ed.), Phonologies of Asia and Africa (pp. 287311). New York: Eisenbrauns.Google Scholar
Bolozky, S. (1999). Measuring productivity in word formation: The case of Israeli Hebrew. Boston: E. J. Brill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, J. L. (1985). Morphology: A study of the relation between meaning and form. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carlisle, J. F. (2003). Morphology matters in learning to read: a commentary. Reading Psychology, 24, 291322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deacon, S. H., & Kirby, J. R. (2004). Morphological awareness: Just “more phonological”? The roles of morphological and phonological awareness in reading development. Applied Psycholinguistics, 25, 223238.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Derwing, B. L. (1992). Orthographic aspects of linguistic competence. In Downing, P., Lima, S., & Noonan, M. (Eds.), The linguistics of literacy (pp. 193210). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferreira, F., Christianson, K., & Hollingworth, A. (2001). Misinterpretations of garden-path sentences: Implications for models of sentence processing and reanalysis. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 30, 320.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Friedmann, N., & Novogrodsky, R. (2007). Is the movement deficit in syntactic SLI related to traces or to thematic role transfer? Brain and Language, 101, 5063.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Frost, R. (1992). Orthography and phonology: The psychological reality of orthographic depth. In Downing, P., Lima, S., & Noonan, M. (Eds.), The linguistics of literacy (pp. 255274). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frost, R., Deutsch, A., & Forster, K. I. (2000). Decomposing morphologically complex words in a nonlinear morphology. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26, 751765.Google Scholar
Frost, R., Kugler, T., Deutsch, A., & Forster, K. I. (2005). Orthographic structure versus morphological structure: Principles of lexical organization in a given language. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31, 12931326.Google Scholar
Gómez, R. L. (2002). Variability and detection of invariant structure. Psychological Science, 13, 431436.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Harm, M. W., & Seidenberg, M. S. (2004). Computing the meaning of words in reading: Co-operative division of labor between visual and phonological processes. Psychological Review, 111, 662720.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hermann, M. (2005). Learning to read and write AHWY vowel letters [in Hebrew]. Unpublished master's thesis, Tel Aviv University, Cognitive Studies Program.Google Scholar
Kaplan, D. (2007). Linguistic facets of reading comprehension: Developmental and cross-genre perspectives [in Hebrew]. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Tel-Aviv University.Google Scholar
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1992). Beyond modularity. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Koriat, A., & Greenberg, S. N. (1996). The enhancement effect in letter detection: Further evidence or the structural model of reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 10, 304315.Google Scholar
Koriat, A., Greenberg, S. N., & Goldshmid, Y. (1991). The missing-letter effect in Hebrew: word frequency or word function? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 17, 6680.Google Scholar
Lubstein, M., & Kozminsky, E. (1999). The effect of the morphological transparency of Hebrew orthography on reading efficiency [in Hebrew]. Script, 1, 127143.Google Scholar
Mann, V. A. (2000). Introduction to special issue on morphology and the acquisition of alphabetic writing systems. Reading and Writing, 12, 143147.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (1998). Morphology in word recognition. In Spencer, A. & Zwicky, A. M. (Eds.), The handbook of morphology (pp. 406427). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Nir, R. (1993). Word formation in modern Hebrew [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Open University.Google Scholar
Perfetti, C. A. (1992). The representation problem in reading acquisition. In Gough, P. B., Ehri, L. C., & Treiman, R. (Eds.), Reading acquisition (pp. 145174). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Perfetti, C. A. (2003). The universal grammar of reading. Scientific Studies of Reading, 7, 324.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perfetti, C. A. (2007). Reading ability: Lexical quality to comprehension. Scientific Studies of Reading, 11, 357383.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ravid, D. (1990). Internal structure constraints on new-word formation devices in Modern Hebrew. Folia Linguistica, 24, 289346.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ravid, D. (1995). Language change in child and adult Hebrew: A psycholinguistic perspective. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ravid, D. (1996). Accessing the mental lexicon: Evidence from incompatibility between representation of spoken and written morphology. Linguistics, 34, 12191246.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ravid, D. (2001). Learning to spell in Hebrew: Phonological and morphological factors. Reading and Writing, 14, 459485.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ravid, D. (2004). Later lexical development in Hebrew: Derivational morphology revisited. In Berman, R. A. (Ed.), Language development across childhood and adolescence: Psycholinguistic and crosslinguistic perspectives (pp. 5382). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ravid, D. (2005). Hebrew orthography and literacy. In Joshi, R. M. & Aaron, P. G. (Eds.), Handbook of orthography and literacy (pp. 339363). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Ravid, D. (2006). Word-level morphology: A psycholinguistic perspective on linear formation in Hebrew nominals. Morphology, 16, 127148.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ravid, D., & Bar-On, A. (2005). Manipulating written Hebrew roots across development: The interface of semantic, phonological and orthographic factors. Reading and Writing, 18, 231256.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ravid, D., & Berman, R. (2009). Developing linguistic register in different text types. Pragmatics & Cognition, 17, 108145.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ravid, D., & Haimowitz, S. (2006). The vowel path: Learning about vowel representation in written Hebrew. Written Language and Literacy, 9, 6793.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ravid, D., & Schiff, R. (2006). Roots and patterns in Hebrew language development: Evidence from written morphological analogies. Reading and Writing, 19, 789818.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reichle, E. D., & Perfetti, C. A. (2003). Morphology in word identification: A word-experience model that accounts for morpheme frequency effects. Scientific Studies of Reading, 7, 219237.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saffran, J. R. (2003). Statistical language learning: Mechanisms and constraints. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12, 110114.Google Scholar
Saiegh-Haddad, E., & Geva, E. (2008). Morphological awareness, phonological awareness, and reading in English–Arabic bilingual children. Reading and Writing, 21, 481504.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schreuder, R., & Baayen, R. H. (1997). How complex simple words can be. Journal of Memory and Language, 37, 118139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schwarzwald, O. R. (1981). Grammar and reality in the Hebrew verb [in Hebrew]. Ramat Gan, Israel: Bar Ilan University Press.Google Scholar
Schwarzwald, O. R. (2002). Modern Hebrew morphology [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Open University.Google Scholar
Segall, O., Nir-Sagiv, B., Kishon-Rabin, L., & Ravid, D. (2008). Prosodic patterns in Hebrew child directed speech. Journal of Child Language, 35, 128.Google Scholar
Seymour, P. H. K. (2005). Theoretical framework for beginning reading in different orthographies. In Joshi, R. M. & Aaron, P. G. (Eds.), Handbook of orthography and literacy (pp. 441463). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Share, D. L. (1995). Phonological recoding and self-teaching: Sine qua non of reading acquisition. Cognition, 55, 151218.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Share, D. L. (1999). Phonological recoding and orthographic learning: A direct test of the self-teaching hypothesis. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 72, 95129.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Share, D. L. (2004). Orthographic learning at a glance: On the time course and developmental onset of self-teaching. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 87, 267298.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Share, D. L. (2008). On the anglocentricities of current reading research and practice: The perils of overreliance on an “outlier” orthography. Psychological Bulletin, 134, 584615.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Share, D. L., & Levin, I. (1999). Learning to read and write in Hebrew. In Harris, M. & Hatano, G. (Eds.), Learning to read and write: A cross-linguistics perspective (pp. 89111). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Share, D. L., & Shalev, C. (2004). Self-teaching in normal and disabled readers. Reading and Writing, 17, 769800.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shimron, J. (1993). The role of vowels in reading: A review of studies of English and Hebrew. Psychological Bulletin, 114, 5267.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shimron, J. (1999). The role of vowel signs in Hebrew: Beyond word recognition. Reading and Writing, 11, 301319.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shimron, J. (Ed.). (2003). Language processing and acquisition in languages of Semitic, root-based morphology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Verhoeven, L., & Perfetti, C. A. (2003). Introduction to the special issue: The role of morphology in learning to read. Scientific Studies of Reading, 7, 209217.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Verhoeven, L., Schreuder, R., & Baayen, R. H. (2003). Units of analysis in reading Dutch bisyllabic pseudowords. Scientific Studies of Reading, 7, 255271.CrossRefGoogle Scholar