ACCESSING THE MENTAL LEXICON - EVIDENCE FROM INCOMPATIBILITY BETWEEN REPRESENTATION OF SPOKEN AND WRITTEN MORPHOLOGY

This work examines the retrieval of inflected forms in Hebrew by two o ral reading routines: an assembled routine, where the phonological lex icon is accessed by assembling orthographic segments that are mapped o nto phonological segments; and an addressed routine, in which the full orthographic form is identified, and then addresses the phonological lexicon. Seventy-five Hebrew-speaking subjects (30 six-year-oldJirst g raders, 30 nine-year-old fourth graders, and 15 college students) were tested on oral reading of two versions of the same Hebrew text: a voc alized version (with diacritic marking of vowels) and a nonvocalized o ne. The texts contained 20 literate forms of words and morphemes that differed from their colloquial or standard forms. The results indicate that first graders read vocalized script more accurately, though with more self-repairs, than fourth graders. The latter achieve the same n umber of correct responses on both versions of the text, indicating th at they provide the vocalization of written words fi om their oral rep resentations alone. Adults' reading reflects a situation of oral diglo ssia, in which words and morphemes have dual representations in the me ntal lexicon - both normative/literate and standard. Implications are discussed for the structure of the mental lexicon, for two competing h ypotheses - universal versus orthographic depth, and for the relations hip between orthography and literacy.