The paper concerns the structural factor of ‘root transparency’ in relation to the morphology-meaning interface in the mental lexicon of Hebrew. Semitic root structure was analyzed by comparing responses of native speakers of Hebrew on a set of written tasks. Target items included both nouns derived from transparent full triconsonantal roots (e.g. migdal “tower” from the root g-d-l) and nouns derived from more opaque defective biconsonantal roots (e.g. taxazit “forecast” from the root x-z-y). Responses to items based on full roots demonstrated that they were across-the-board more accessible and easier to process than their defective counterparts. Moreover, the difference between performance on items derived from full compared with defective roots was found to interface with phonology, semantics, and syntax, as well as with familiarity/frequency. These results indicate that root transparency plays an important and pervasive role in the mental lexicon of Hebrew.

Writing argumentative texts is a hallmark of literacy attainments with a long and laborious trajectory. The present study explored the incipient stages in argumentative texts written by 293 Hebrew-speaking Israeli children in second, third, fourth, and fifth grades. The literacy cognitive, transcriptional, linguistic, and reading abilities were analyzed, as well the different text structure quality of children’s argumentative texts. The results indicate that that both literacy ability and text structure quality increase with age. However, not all the increases in the different literacy abilities are significant. Text structure quality—a measure of text organization and ideation—becomes more sophisticated and complete with age, attaining high-quality text structure in fourth and fifth grades in the production of autonomous texts with genre-driven elaborate features. The predictive power of the different literacy abilities to sustain a better-structured text varies across ages.

Derived nouns constitute a productive group of abstract nouns in Hebrew, consisting of action nominals as well as other verb-related nouns in other morphological patterns. This study traces the route taken by Hebrew-speaking children, adolescents and adults on a written sentence-construction test. The test consisted of six pairs of derived nouns sharing the same root but having different meanings (analogous to English pairs like process-procedure, destiny-destination) and was administered to 110 native speakers of Hebrew (school-goers in grades VI, VIII, and XI and two groups of adults, younger and older). Results of both quantitative and qualitative analyses point to the influence of various semantic factors on later lexical development on the one hand, and a close semantic-syntactic interdependency, on the other.

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