Does Processing a Shallow and a Deep Orthography Produce Different Brain Activity Patterns? An ERP Study Conducted in Hebrew

Abstract

Orthographies range from shallow orthographies with transparent grapheme-phoneme relations, to deep orthographies, in which these relations are opaque. Two forms of script transcribe the Hebrew language: the shallow pointed script (with diacritics) and the deep unpointed script (without diacritics). This study was set out to examine whether the reading of these scripts evokes distinct brain activity. Preliminary results indicate distinct Event-related-potentials (ERPs). As an equivalent finding was absent when ERPs of non-orthographic stimuli with and without meaningless diacritics were compared, the results imply that print-specific aspects of processing account for the distinct activity elicited by the pointed and unpointed scripts.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This article presents preliminary data from the author's Ph.D. thesis.

Notes

The research was supported by the Edmond J. Safra Philanthropic Foundation.