| Number | 466 |
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| Year | 1984 |
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| Drawer | 8 |
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| Entry Date | 11/19/1999 |
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| Authors | Bentin, S., Bargai, N., & Katz, L. |
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| Contact | |
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| Publication | Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 10, 353-368. |
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| Abstract | Investigated the role of phonemic mediation for lexical access when printed Hebrew words are presented in isolation. In print, dots that representvowels in Hebrew script are almost always omitted, and because a single consonant string may represent several different words (with different
vowels), the reader can assign to it a unique meaning and pronunciation only in relation to the syntactic and semantic contexts. Two experiments involving a total of 32 undergraduates manipulated phonemic ambiguity by comparing consonant strings that have only a single meaningful pronunciation with strings that are several meaningful pronunciations. Although naming was slower when several pronunciations were possible, these phonemically ambiguous strings were not recognized more slowly in a lexical-decision task. A 3rd study, in which lexical decisions were made by 16 undergraduates for consonant strings presented with the vowel dots, showed that nonword homographs were rejected more slowly than were nonword homophones. These results suggest that in Hebrew, orthographic codes play a more important role in the process of word recognition than do phonemic codes, especially in comparison with the roles played in other languages. |
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