ORTHOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATION AND PHONEMIC SEGMENTATION IN SKILLED READERS - A CROSS-LANGUAGE COMPARISON

The long-lasting effect of reading experience in Hebrew and English on phonemic segmentation was examined in skilled readers. Hebrew and English orthographies differ in the way they represent phonological information. Whereas each phoneme in English is represented by a discrete letter, in unpointed Hebrew most of the vowel information is not conveyed by the print, and, therefore, a letter often corresponds to a CV utterance (i.e., a consonant plus a vowel). Adult native speakers of Hebrew or English, presented with words consisting of a consonant, a vowel, and then another consonant, were required to delete the first ''sound'' of each word and to pronounce the remaining utterance as fast as possible. Hebrew speakers deleted the initial CV segment instead of the initial consonant more often than English speakers, for both Hebrew and English words. Moreover, Hebrew speakers were significantly slower than English speakers in correctly deleting the initial phoneme, and faster in deleting the whole syllable. These results suggest that the manner in which orthography represents phonology not only affects phonological awareness during reading acquisition, but also has a long-lasting effect on skilled readers' intuitions concerning the phonological structure of their spoken language.