Reading is one of the most important human cultural achievements. Much research in the fieldbr of cognitive psychology has focused on the reading process in various languages. Moreover, newbr studies of neuroimaging clearly show the durable changes made in the developing brain by thebr acquisition of literacy, indicating that reading ability is a lasting new specialization of the brain forbr orthographic print (Maurer, Brem, Bucher & Brandeis (2005). Nevertheless, it is still under debatebr how the different types of sublexical units, such as letter clusters, syllables, and morphemes, contributebr to the recognition of the whole word while reading. This project will examine how the different basicbr units are processed and integrated in visual word recognition: First, how is the meaning of complexbr words assembled? Second, what are the sublexical units that guide visual word recognition -br morphemes or syllables? A cross-linguistic comparison between German and Hebrew is of particularbr interest, since these languages belong to different language families, Indo-European and Semitic,br respectively, and consequently different typologies, with different phonotactics, morphologicalbr systems, as well as different orthographies (Schwarzwald, 2001; Wiese, 1996). Thus for example,br Indo-European languages are mostly concatentative, that is, morphemes are appended to one anotherbr in a linear fashion, with a relatively smaller amount of word-internal morphology, such as Umlaut inbr German. In contrast, Semitic morphology is typically nonconcatenative (McCarthy, 1981): Wordsbr comprise two abstract morphemes, the root and the word pattern, which are intertwined one within thebr other. As a result, consonants are more linguistically prominent in Hebrew than vowels (Ravid, 2003,br 2005). Linear structures, which also abound in Hebrew, are based upon the nonconcatenativebr structures (Ravid, 2006). Against this background, this project will thus ask whether the readingbr process in these two languages is differently affected by syllabic, morphemic, or whole-word units.
