Many ways to read your vowels—Neural processing of diacritics and vowel letters in Hebrew

Weiss, Yael; Katzir, Tami; Bitan, Tali

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.07.029

Cited by 22 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…Since the quality of root morpheme representations may contribute to the ease at which non-vowelized script is read (Bar-on & Ravid, 2011;Saiegh-Haddad & Geva, 2008;Saiegh-Haddad & Henkin-Roitfarb, 2014), the poorer non-vowelized reading skills of the VOW group might stem from weaker internalization of these morphemes. In contrast, the two groups performed similarly on the fully vowelized text, suggesting that reading with diacritics may require skills other than morphological abilities alone, such as bottom-up grapheme-to-phoneme mappings (Weiss et al, 2015(Weiss et al, , 2016.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 86%

“…Lastly, a non-frequent fully vowelized script, used for poetry and religious texts, must be mastered from Grade 4 onwards. For expert readers of the non-vowelized script, fully vowelized Arabic is composed of non-familiar orthographic forms (Weiss, Katzir, & Bitan, 2015) for which letter-by-letter recoding strategies have to be applied (see Weiss et al, 2016) to prevent the automatic access to root morphemes from interfering with reading. Therefore, fully vowelized and non-vowelized scripts are read with distinct strategies (Frost & Bentin, 1992), which might also be associated with distinct visual attention distribution modes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Does the Visual Attention Span Play a Role in Reading in Arabic?

Lallier

Mallouh

Mohammed

et al. 2018

Scientific Studies of Reading

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It is unclear whether the association between the visual attention span (VA span) and reading differs across languages. Here we studied this relationship in Arabic, where the use of specific reading strategies depends on the amount of diacritics on words: reading vowelized and non-vowelized Arabic scripts favor sublexical and lexical strategies, respectively. We hypothesized that the size of the VA span and its association to reading would differ depending on individual "script preferences". We compared children who were more proficient in reading fully vowelized Arabic than nonvowelized Arabic (VOW), to children for whom the opposite was true (NOVOW). NOVOW children showed a crowding effect in the VA span task, whereas VOW children did not. Moreover, the crowding in the VA span task correlated with the reading performance in the NOVOW group only. These results are discussed in light of individual differences on the use of reading strategies in Arabic.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 86%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does the Visual Attention Span Play a Role in Reading in Arabic?

Lallier

Mallouh

Mohammed

et al. 2018

Scientific Studies of Reading

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“…Reaction times (RT) were collected starting from the stimulus presentation to the onset of vocalization. The 96 words from the current experiment were presented together with 152 words from another experiment (see Weiss et al, 2015a , b ) which were similar in length and frequency and also appeared in both the pointed and un-pointed versions. Hence, the total number of trials for both experiments together was 248.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…In skilled adult readers diacritics have mixed effects, showing either facilitation ( Navon and Shimron, 1981 ; Shimron and Navon, 1982 ; Koriat, 1984 , 1985 ) or no effect ( Bentin and Frost, 1987 ; Shimron and Sivan, 1994 ; Schiff and Ravid, 2004 ; Harel-Koren, 2007 ) on speed and accuracy of word recognition. However, both behavioral ( Weiss et al, 2015a ) and brain imaging ( Weiss et al, 2015b ) studies, of word reading in Hebrew show that even skilled adult readers who do not benefit from diacritics in terms of accuracy or RT, resort to a more piecemeal segmentation approach of decoding small units when reading pointed words.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Orthographic Transparency Enhances Morphological Segmentation in Children Reading Hebrew Words

et al. 2018

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Morphological processing of derived words develops simultaneously with reading acquisition. However, the reader’s engagement in morphological segmentation may depend on the language morphological richness and orthographic transparency, and the readers’ reading skills. The current study tested the common idea that morphological segmentation is enhanced in non-transparent orthographies to compensate for the absence of phonological information. Hebrew’s rich morphology and the dual version of the Hebrew script (with and without diacritic marks) provides an opportunity to study the interaction of orthographic transparency and morphological segmentation on the development of reading skills in a within-language design. Hebrew speaking 2nd (N = 27) and 5th (N = 29) grade children read aloud 96 noun words. Half of the words were simple mono-morphemic words and half were bi-morphemic derivations composed of a productive root and a morphemic pattern. In each list half of the words were presented in the transparent version of the script (with diacritic marks), and half in the non-transparent version (without diacritic marks). Our results show that in both groups, derived bi-morphemic words were identified more accurately than mono-morphemic words, but only for the transparent, pointed, script. For the un-pointed script the reverse was found, namely, that bi-morphemic words were read less accurately than mono-morphemic words, especially in second grade. Second grade children also read mono-morphemic words faster than bi-morphemic words. Finally, correlations with a standardized measure of morphological awareness were found only for second grade children, and only in bi-morphemic words. These results, showing greater morphological effects in second grade compared to fifth grade children suggest that for children raised in a language with a rich morphology, common and easily segmented morphemic units may be more beneficial for younger compared to older readers. Moreover, in contrast to the common hypothesis, our results show that morphemic segmentation does not compensate for the missing phonological information in a non-transparent orthography, but rather that morphological segmentation is most beneficial in the highly transparent script. These results are consistent with the idea that morphological and phonological segmentation processes occur simultaneously and do not constitute alternative pathways to visual word recognition.

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“…Three comparisons were performed in a previous work [3] for stimuli presented in reading aloud task: (1) Hebrew words compared to string of asterisks; (2) Hebrew words with diacritic marks and words without diacritic marks; (3) Hebrew words with roots and templates and Hebrew words without roots. (Words with roots can be segmented into a root and template, while words with no roots cannot.)…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Classification from generation: Recognizing deep grammatical information during reading from rapid event-related fMRI

Bitan

Hazan

Manevitz

et al. 2016

2016 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN)

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A novel fMRI classification method designed for rapid event related fMRI experiments is described and applied to the classification of loud reading of isolated words in Hebrew. Three comparisons of different grammatical complexity were performed: (i) words versus asterisks (ii) "with diacritics versus without diacritics" and (iii) "with root versus no root". We discuss the most difficult task and, for comparison, the easiest one. Earlier work using more standard classification techniques (machine learning and statistical) succeeded fully only in the simplest of these tasks (i), but produced only partial results on (ii) and failed completely, even on the training set on the deepest task (iii).The method performs a "best match" between pre-processed data and computing a full library of artificially generated examples. The method involves a deconvolution of the rapid events on the data and performing a convolution on the generated data. The best-match is performed over all "words" constructed by convolving the response functions of each value of each event performed in a "windowed" sequence. This is accomplished separately for all voxels and then a voting procedure defines the outcome.Using the same feature selection (ANOVA) as in the earlier methods, (i) there is a dramatic increase in the accuracy rate for the third (most difficult task) on the intra-run level (88%) as well as the first task (ii) Unlike the earlier methods training and testing over all runs (within subject) achieves a significant level of classification (64% accuracy) for the training set. This shows the information for this "deeper" cognitive task can in fact be extracted from the fMRI information.

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Many ways to read your vowels—Neural processing of diacritics and vowel letters in Hebrew

Cited by 22 publications

References 60 publications

Does the Visual Attention Span Play a Role in Reading in Arabic?

Does the Visual Attention Span Play a Role in Reading in Arabic?

Orthographic Transparency Enhances Morphological Segmentation in Children Reading Hebrew Words

Classification from generation: Recognizing deep grammatical information during reading from rapid event-related fMRI

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