Processing lexical ambiguity and visual word recognition in a deep orthography.

We investigated the effect of semantic and phonemic ambiguity on lexical decision and naming performance in the deep Hebrew orthography. Experiment 1 revealed that lexical decisions for ambiguous consonant strings are faster than those for any of the highor low-frequency voweled alternative meanings of the same strings. These 1'esults suggested that lexical decisions for phonemically and semantically ambiguous Hebrew consonant strings are based on the ambiguous o7'fhographic information. However, a significant frequency effect for both ambiguous and unambiguous words suggested that if vowels are p1'esent, subjects do not ignore them completely while making lexical decisions. Experiment 2 revealed that naming low-frequency voweled alternatives of ambiguous strings took significantly longer than naming the high-frequency alternatives or the unvoweled strings without a significant difference between the latter two string types. Voweled and unvoweled unambiguous strings, however, were named equally fast. We propose that semantic and phonological disambiguation of unvoweled words in Hebrew is achieved in parallel to the lexical decision, but is not required by it. Naming Hebrew words usually requires a readout of phonemic information from the lexicon. This study examined the influence of phonemic and semantic ambiguity on lexical decision and naming performance in Hebrew. Most lexical ambiguity research has concentrated primarily on the way homographs (polysemous words) are disambiguated within a semantic context (for a recent review see Simpson, 1984). Little has been said about lexical access of isolated ambiguous words or about ambiguity effects on the process of word recognition. Examination of lexical ambiguity in relation to lexical access and models of word recognition IS of special interest in Hebrew orthography because of its special way of conveying phonemic * Memory £4 Cognition, 1987, 15, 13-23. t Also, Aranne Laboratory of Human Psychophysiology, Department of Neurology, Hadassah Hospital, and Department of Psychology, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. + Also, Department of Psychology, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. Aknowledgment. We thank Drs. Morris Moscovitch, Leonard Katz, and J ames Chumbley for useful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and Tammi Rossman for her skillful help. This W01'k was supported in part by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Grant HD-01994 to Haskins Laboratories. = HASKINS LABORATORIES: Status Report on Speech Research SR-88 (1986)=