Introduction: A Linguist’s Journey Towards Written Language

Abstract

This book presents psycholinguistic model of how Hebrew spelling knowledge is learned and processed in interaction with morphological and phonological knowledge. Linguistic analysis and mainstream investigation of first language acquisition were restricted for many years to spoken language. But in the last decades we have learned that the major changes in linguistic abilities witnessed across childhood and adolescence could not be envisioned without the platform of literacy and written language. Olson's (1994, The world on paper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) model predicts that thinking about language is enabled by gaining command of written language, and that once learned, written language in fact takes over as a model for thinking about language. Olson's insight provides a framework for how the orthography serves as a model for thinking about language. Chapter 1 lists three levels of representation used in this book. The first level of phonological representation highlights those phonological features which distinguish spoken Hebrew words. The second level of morphological representation serves for the transcription of morpheme-level Hebrew, relevant to morphological analysis and orthographic representation. The deepest or most abstract level of representation used in this work is orthographic, and it comes in two varieties: Hebrew and Latinate.