Letter-transposition effects are not universal: The impact of transposing letters in Hebrew

Abstract

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. KeywordsMorphology; Letter Transposition; Hebrew; Masked-Priming Lexical architecture is often described as a high-dimensional perceptual space that is defined in terms of orthographic, phonological, and semantic properties, where words are represented as points within this space. A typical example is attractor-based models where each word has a unique attractor, and the process of word recognition is then described in terms of a trajectory of the system through its state space (e.g., Rueckl, 2002;Harm, McCandliss & Seidenberg, 2003;Harm & Seidenberg, 2004;Elman, 2004). The initial point of this trajectory is some random position in the state space, and the final point is an attractor basin corresponding to the input word. In visual word recognition research, the relative position of word units is usually determined according to orthographic properties, so the distance between two words that are orthographically similar is necessarily shorter than the distance between words which are dissimilar. Also, since in most triangular models there are subspaces organized by different linguistic properties (orthographic, phonological, and semantic), with brief exposure durations, Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Ram Frost, Department of Psychology, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 91905, Israel. Email: frost@mscc.huji.ac.il. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before...

The search for an input-coding scheme: Transposed-letter priming in Arabic

“…The present data add further evidence to the view that lexical space in Semitic languages is defined by root families, so that "all words derived from a given root are clustered together" (Velan & Frost, 2007, p. 916; see also Frost et al, 2005;Velan & Frost, 2009). Given that transposed-letter priming with word primes does not occur in the absence of a morphological/semantic relationship-as was shown in Experiment 1 when primes and targets were derived from different roots (see also Duñabeitia et al, 2009, for evidence in Spanish)-the stitution neighbors was 7.9 (range, 1-25).…”

“…These words were preceded by prime words that were (1) It has been proposed that lexical space in Semitic languages is not organized in orthographic terms, as in Indo-European language, the reason being that, in Semitic languages, lexical space would be organized according to root families (Frost, 2009). Consistent with this hypothesis, Velan and Frost (2009) showed that when the root letters of a nonword prime are transposed in Hebrew, the transposed-letter priming effect found in Indo-European languages is absent. In their Experiment 3, response times (RTs) to a target word such as mdrgh, whose root is d.r.g, were similar when the prime was the transposed-letter nonword prime mrdgh, which has the nonexisting root r.d.g, and when the prime was a replacement-letter nonword prime in which two letters from the root were replaced; furthermore, a condition that employed a transposed-letter root prime (mgrdh, a word that is derived from the existing root g.r.d ) showed a small (11-msec) inhibitory effect, relative to the replacement-letter condition.…”

“…In an overlap model, letter location of the root letters would need to be precise, so that there would be a rather rigid relative position coding to activate the letters that compose a given root (see Velan & Frost, 2009). In contrast, the input-coding schemes that use open bigrams (e.g., Grainger & van Heuven, 2003;Whitney, 2001) or a spatial coding (Davis, 1999) run into difficulties when dealing with Hebrew data, because the internal structure of Semitic languages dictates the sequence of letters and this is quite different from the less constrained orthographic structure of Indo-European languages (see Velan & Frost, 2009).…”

“…In their Experiment 3, response times (RTs) to a target word such as mdrgh, whose root is d.r.g, were similar when the prime was the transposed-letter nonword prime mrdgh, which has the nonexisting root r.d.g, and when the prime was a replacement-letter nonword prime in which two letters from the root were replaced; furthermore, a condition that employed a transposed-letter root prime (mgrdh, a word that is derived from the existing root g.r.d ) showed a small (11-msec) inhibitory effect, relative to the replacement-letter condition. Velan and Frost (2009) used the overlap model to explain their data: The order of the root letters would be allowed only a minimum degree of perceptual noise in an overlap-like model, to avoid the negative impact of activating the "wrong" root family. That is, letter ordering of a word's root letters would be critical in lexical access of Semitic languages (Velan & Frost, 2007).…”

Transposition effects in reading Japanese Kana: Are they orthographic in nature?

“…3 Thus, the present data suggest that the stage of letter/mora position coding is-to some degree-language independent. We acknowledge, however, that factors such as visual format (as Korean Hangul; see Lee & Taft, 2009) or the morphological characteristics of a given language (e.g., the ordering of the root letters in Semitic languages; Velan & Frost, 2009; see also Perea, Abu Mallouh, García-Orza & Carreiras, 2010) may influence the process of letter position coding.…”