概要 All
Hebrew words are composed of two interwoven morphemes: a tri-consonantal root
and a phonological word pattern. Models of lexical organization in Hebrew
suggest that words are organized in the mental lexicon by a morphological
principle, and probably stored in clusters
of word families defined by a shared root (Frost et al., 1997). In
this case,extracting the root letters from the printed word would be the
initial step in Hebrew visual word recognition. Two main experimental
paradigms
serve for the purpose of examining morphological processing of
printed words: Masked priming, and parafoveal preview benefit. In
masked priming a pattern mask is presented before the prime, with a very
brief temporal interval between the onset of the priming stimulus and the
subsequent target stimulus. Thus the prime itself is unavailable for report.
In the parafoveal preview benefit paradigm, the benefit of
information
perceived in the parafovea before the eyes actually land on a target word
is measured. The comparison between masked priming and parafoveal
preview benefit effects is compelling because both paradigms tap
early processes of word recognition, and both are relatively free of
strategic effects. This is because in both paradigms readers are unable
to consciously identify the initially presented stimulus. Results obtained using
both procedures in parallel reveal that Hebrew readers decompose printed words
into their morphemic constituents and use the root information for lexical
access.
