The Development of the Hebrew Mental Lexicon: When Morphological Representations Become Devoid of Their Meaning

Morpho-Orthographic Processing in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: The Case of Hebrew Orthography

“…This has been demonstrated in various languages including Italian [42], French [43], Arabic [44], and Hebrew [45, 46]. This view gained support from many studies showing a positive correlation between morphological awareness and reading development [47, 48] as well as reading disabilities [49].…”

“…Studies in various languages have shown that children with typical reading development utilize morphological information in order to read morphologically complex words [42-44, 46]. In other words, learning to recognize and use morpho-orthographic patterns in reading morphologically based unpointed pseudowords may be at least partially dependent on stable and mature morphological knowledge.…”

How orthographic transparency affects morphological processing in young readers with and without reading disability

“…() and Schiff et al . (), according to which morphological representations become more independent of orthography with increasing reading ability and word exposure. This is also consistent with the conclusions of Quèmart and Casalis (), which we reported in the Introduction.…”

“…However, no morphological facilitation was found when primes and targets did not overlap in the surface forms of the root. Two other studies investigated the earliest stages of word recognition in child readers of English (Beyersmann et al, 2012a) and Hebrew (Schiff et al, 2012), respectively. Both studies tested a different property of morphologically related words, that is, the semantic relatedness between a target word and its prime.…”

“…Evidence concerning morphological processing in children was obtained with different methodologies (e.g., naming task, lexical decision task) and materials (e.g., morphologically complex words and pseudowords) by using morphologically complex stimuli that were both orthographically and semantically opaque or transparent (see, e.g., Beyersmann, Castles & Coltheart, 2012a;Schiff, Raveh & Fighel, 2012). It has been argued that shifts in phonology/orthography and/or semantics in the base of a complex word may reduce the benefits of morphological processing (Reichle & Perfetti, 2003); but contrary to this hypothesis, one study conducted on English (McCormick, Rastle & Davis, 2008) suggested that adult skilled readers are insensitive to orthographic alterations in the stems of derived words at an early stage of word processing.…”