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Morphological analysis in learning to read pseudowords in Hebrew

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 June 2011

AMALIA BAR-ON*
Affiliation:
Tel Aviv University
DORIT RAVID
Affiliation:
Tel Aviv University
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Amalia Bar-On, Department of Communications Disorders, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel. E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

This paper examines the role of morphology in gradeschool children's learning to read nonpointed Hebrew. It presents two experiments testing the reading of morphologically based nonpointed pseudowords. One hundred seventy-one Hebrew-speaking children and adolescents in seven age/schooling groups (beginning and end of 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 7th, and 11th grade) and a group of adults participated in the study. Participants were administered two tasks of reading aloud nonpointed pseudowords with morphological composition: words in isolation and words in sentential context. Results pinpoint the developmental milestones on the way to efficient nonpointed word recognition in Hebrew: learning to use morphological pattern cues to fill in missing phonological information, where second grade is an important “watershed” period; and overcoming homography by learning to detect morphosyntactic cues, an ability that develops more gradually and over a longer period than pattern recognition.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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