Orthographic and phonemic coding for lexical access: evidence from Hebrew

In Hebrew script, vowels are represented by small dots appended to the consonants. However, in print the dots are almost always omitted, and because a single consonant string may represent several different words (with different vowels), the reader can assign to it a unique meaning and pronunciation only in relation to the syntactic and semantic contexts. We investigated the role of phonemic mediation for lexical access when printed Hebrew words are presented in isolation. Two experiments manipulated phonemic ambiguity by comparing consonant strings that have only a single meaningful pronunciation with strings that have several meaningful pronunciations. Although naming was slower when several pronunciations were possible, these phonemically ambiguous strings were not recognized more slowly in a lexical-decision task. A third study, in which lexical decisions were made for consonant strings presented with the vowel dots, showed that nonword homographs were rejected more slowly than were nonword homophones. These results suggest that in Hebrew, orthographic codes play a more important role in the process of word recognition than do phonemic codes, especially in comparison with the roles played in other languages.