The effect of orthographic depth on reliance upon semantic context for oral reading in English and Hebrew

Benuck, Marni B.; Peverly, Stephen T.

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9817.2004.00232.x

Cited by 10 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 30 publications

(47 reference statements)

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“…Using this method for investigating the role of context in Hebrew among bilingual Hebrew-English college students, Benuck and Peverly (2004) hypothesized that context would be more influential in unpointed Hebrew owing to phonological ambiguity. They found that the same readers, when presented with parallel sentences in Hebrew and in English, relied significantly more on context to read words in Hebrew than in English.…”

Section: Phase 3: the Role Of Supralexical Context In Resolving Homograph Identity In Unpointed Textmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning to Read a Semitic Abjad: The Triplex Model of Hebrew Reading Development

Bar-On

2017

J Learn Disabil

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We introduce a model of Hebrew reading development that emphasizes both the universal and script-specific aspects of learning to read a Semitic abjad. At the universal level, the study of Hebrew reading acquisition offers valuable insights into the fundamental dilemmas of all writing systems-balancing the competing needs of the novice versus the expert reader (Share, 2008). At the script-specific level, pointed Hebrew initially employs supplementary vowel signs, providing the beginning reader a consistent, phonologically well-specified script while helping the expert-to-be unitize words and morphemes via (consonantal) spelling constancy. A major challenge for the developing Hebrew reader is negotiating the transition from pointed to unpointed Hebrew, with its abundance of homographs. Our triplex model emphasizes three phases of early Hebrew reading development: a progression from lower-order, phonological (sublexical) sequential spelling-to-sound translation (Phase 1, Grade 1) to higher-order, string-level (lexical) lexico-morpho-orthographic processing (Phase 2, Grade 2) followed, in the upper elementary grades, by a supralexical contextual level (Phase 3) essential for dealing with the pervasive homography of unpointed Hebrew.

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Section: Phase 3: the Role Of Supralexical Context In Resolving Homograph Identity In Unpointed Textmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning to Read a Semitic Abjad: The Triplex Model of Hebrew Reading Development

Bar-On

2017

J Learn Disabil

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“…From the third grade onwards, children are gradually exposed to unvowelled texts, where they become dependent on the orthographic, morphological, semantic and contextual cues to decode and spell without full phonological information (Ravid, ; Share & Levin, ). The unvowelled version of the Hebrew orthography would be considered to be an example of a deep orthography because accurate decoding is dependent on contextual as well as morphological information to compensate for the missing phonological information (Benuck & Peverly, ). The Hebrew‐speaking participants in the current study were all literate in both vowelled and unvowelled Hebrew.…”

Section: El1 and Efl Spelling Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

English as a foreign language spelling: comparisons between good and poor spellers

Russak

Kahn-Horwitz

2013

Journal Research in Reading

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This study examined English as a foreign language (EFL) spelling development amongst 233 fifth-grade, eighth-grade and 10th-grade Hebrew first-language speakers to examine effects of English orthographic exposure on spelling. Good and poor speller differences were examined regarding the acquisition of novel phonemes (/ae/, /Λ/ and / /) and orthographic conventions (/ð/, /θ/, / / and silent 'e'). Hebrew measures included standardised spelling and orthographic and phonological tasks. Experimental English measures included real-word and pseudoword spellings, orthographic tasks and standardised spellings. Results showed significant differences in spelling accuracy between good and poor spellers at all grades. Spelling accuracy for most conventions did not improve after the eighth grade. Spellings of consonantal clusters, initial h and /ð/ differed between good and poor spellers in the fifth grade only. Hebrew spelling was one of the strongest predictors of EFL real-word and pseudoword spellings in both fifth and eighth grades. Implications for teaching practice are discussed. Practitioner pointsWhat is already known about this topic • The depth of the English orthography makes spelling acquisition an extended process for first-language (L1) English speakers. • Reading and spelling are reliant on similar cognitive and linguistic mechanisms.• Different linguistic components impact on L1 and foreign-language spelling accuracy at different stages.

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“…The choice of symbolization entails an equally important but perhaps less obvious choice about which orthographic depth is most suitable: shallow or deep? The relative depth of different orthographies has been a key concept in the linguistics of writing ever since it was first introduced by Katz and Feldman (1981, 1983) and it remains the focus of ongoing research (e.g., Benuck & Peverly, 2004; Caravolas, Lervåg, Defior, Málková, & Hulme, 2013; Snider, 2014; Ziegler et al, 2010). Some orthographies, such as Spanish, are relatively shallow, mostly maintaining a one to one phonographic correspondence; others, such as French, are much deeper, the link between speech and spelling being less obvious.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neither Deep nor Shallow: A Classroom Experiment Testing the Orthographic Depth of Tone Marking in Kabiye (Togo)

2015

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The experiment reported here tests the Lexical Orthography Hypothesis, that is, the notion that the output of the lexical phonology is the most promising phonological depth for an exhaustive representation of tone by means of diacritics in the orthography of atone language. We conducted a controlled classroom experiment with 97 secondary school pupils learning written Kabiye, a Gur language of northern Togo. After testing their baseline skills in writing the standard orthography, the pupils participated in an eleven-hour transition course spread over three weeks in four parallel groups: DEEP (an experimental orthography representing the input of the lexical phonology), LEXICAL (representing the output of the lexical phonology), PHONEMIC (representing a level between the output of the lexical phonology and the output of the post-lexical phonology), and a control group. On the final day of the experiment, we tested their acquired skills in a dictation exercise. The results show that the LEXICAL group outperforms the other groups in three of the error types associated with adding diacritics, although they performed less well on the error type associated with writing long vowels. This initial evidence supporting the Lexical Orthography Hypothesis needs confirmation with reading and writing experiments on a variety of other tone languages.

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The effect of orthographic depth on reliance upon semantic context for oral reading in English and Hebrew

Cited by 10 publications

References 30 publications

Learning to Read a Semitic Abjad: The Triplex Model of Hebrew Reading Development

Learning to Read a Semitic Abjad: The Triplex Model of Hebrew Reading Development

English as a foreign language spelling: comparisons between good and poor spellers

Neither Deep nor Shallow: A Classroom Experiment Testing the Orthographic Depth of Tone Marking in Kabiye (Togo)

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