Presents an overview to articles on morphological processing published in the periodical 'Language and Cognitive Processes,' volume 15, 2000. Garnering of evidence from Hebrew, French, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Dutch, German, Finnish, Chinese and English languages; Ecological validity of models of word recognition; Focus on cognitive processes within the visual modality.

In contemporary Hebrew.

A strong phonological theory of reading is proposed and discussed. The first claim of this article is that current debates on word recognition are often based on different axioms regarding the cognitive structures of the mental lexicon rather than conflicting empirical evidence. These axioms lead to different interpretations of the same data. It is argued that once the implicit axioms of competing theories in visual word recognition are explicated, a strong phonological model presents a viable and coherent approach. The assumptions underlying a strong phonological theory of reading are outlined, and 4 theoretical questions are examined: Is phonological recoding a mandatory phase of print processing? Is phonology necessary for lexical access? Is phonology necessary for accessing meaning? How can phonology be derived from orthographic structure? These issues are integrated into a general theory that is constrained by all of the findings.

Reports an error in "What can we learn from the morphology of Hebrew? A masked-priming investigation of morphological representation" by Ram Frost, Kenneth I. Forster and Avital Deutsch (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1997[Jul], Vol 23[4], 829-856). On page 854, two Hebrew words are missing from Appendix F. The corrected Appendix appears with the erratum. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record [rid]1997-05320-003[/rid].) All Hebrew words are composed of 2 interwoven morphemes: a triconsonantal root and a phonological word pattern. The lexical representations of these morphemic units were examined using masked priming. When primes and targets shared an identical word pattern, neither lexical decision nor naming of targets was facilitated. In contrast, root primes facilitated both lexical decisions and naming of target words that were derived from these roots. This priming effect proved to be independent of meaning simila

In the present study, we investigated orienting response generalization across various types of semantically related stimuli. Four experiments, based on a modified version of the guilty knowledge technique, were designed to examine whether semantic relations based on abstract features are reflected by electrodermal responsivity. No generalization across coordinates was obtained, but a moderate degree of generalization was demonstrated between a word and its superordinate category (e.g., table-furniture) and between a word and its synonym. Complete generalization occurred from a verbal label of an object to its pictorial representation, and vice versa. These results are compatible with our proposal that partial identification of the test stimulus as relevant is a necessary condition for generalization in the guilty knowledge technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The long-lasting effect of reading experience in Hebrew and English on phonemic segmentation was examined in skilled readers. Hebrew and English orthographies differ in the way they represent phonological information. Whereas each phoneme in English is represented by a discrete letter, in unpointed Hebrew most of the vowel information is not conveyed by the print, and, therefore, a letter often corresponds to a CV utterance (i.e., a consonant plus a vowel). Adult native speakers of Hebrew or English, presented with words consisting of a consonant, a vowel, and then another consonant, were required to delete the first "sound" of each word and to pronounce the remaining utterance as fast as possible. Hebrew speakers deleted the initial CV segment instead of the initial consonant more often than English speakers, for both Hebrew and English words. Moreover, Hebrew speakers were significantly slower than English speakers in correctly deleting the initial phoneme, and faster in deleting th

The role of assembled versus addressed phonology in reading was investigated by examining the size of the minimal phonological unit that is recovered in the reading process. Readers named words in unpointed Hebrew that had many or few missing vowels in their printed forms. Naming latencies were monotonically related to the number of missing vowels. Missing vowels had no effects on lexical decision latencies. These results support a strong phonological model of naming and suggest that even in deep orthographies, phonology is not retrieved from the mental lexicon as a holistic lexical unit but is initially computed by applying letter-to-phoneme computation rules. The partial phonological representation is shaped and completed through top-down activation.

The validity of the orthographic depth hypothesis (ODH) was examined in Hebrew by employing pointed (shallow) and unpointed (deep) print. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed larger frequency effects and larger semantic priming effects in naming with unpointed print than with pointed print. In Experiments 3 and 4, subjects were presented with Hebrew consonantal strings that were followed by vowel marks appearing at stimulus onset asynchronies ranging from 0 ms (simultaneous presentation) to 300 ms from the onset of consonant presentation. Subjects were inclined to wait for the vowel marks to appear even though the words could be named unequivocally using lexical phonology. These results suggested that prelexical phonology was the default strategy for readers in shallow orthographies, providing strong support for the ODH.

Speech detection and matching simultaneously presented printed and spoken words were used to examine phonologic and phonetic processing of Hebrew heterophonic homographs. Subjects detected a correspondence between an ambiguous letter string and the amplitude envelopes of both dominant and subordinate phonological alternatives. Similar effects were obtained when the homographs were phonologically disambiguated by adding vowel marks. The matching of the unpointed printed forms of heterophonic homographs to the dominant and subordinate spoken alternatives presented auditorily was as fast as matching the pointed unambiguous forms to the respective spoken words. This outcome was not obtained when print and speech were not presented simultaneously. These results suggest that printed heterophonic homographs activate the two spoken alternatives they represent and provide further confirmation for fast phonetic recoding in reading.