Lateralization effects in reading pointed and unpointed Hebrew

Abstract

Hebrew has 2 forms of spelling, pointed and unpointed. In the pointed spelling, diacritical signs (pointing) are added to consonantal letters to convey vowel information. These are omitted in the unpointed spelling. Since pointing conveys information that is critical for the prelexical derivation of phonology, it was hypothesized that its absence would prove detrimental for left hemishere (LH) but not for right hemisphere (RH) reading and that, for the former, pointing effects would increase with increasing word length. Three experiments, 1 involving lexical decision and 2 involving word pronunciation, yielded little support for these hypotheses; rather, pointing had an overall adverse effect on performance and this effect tended to be more pronounced for LH reading. An LH advantage was indicated. Since for central vision pointing has been found to aid performance under similar conditions, the results were seen to suggest a distinction between the visual and the phonological effects of pointing; pointing may impair early stages of visual analysis but may aid in the derivation of speech codes.