The effect of orthographic depth on reliance upon semantic context for oral reading in English and Hebrew

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between orthographic depth and reliance upon context for oral reading in English and Hebrew. Research on context effects in English has indicated that the decoding ability of adequate readers is only minimally affected by context. The effect of context may be greater in Hebrew because of its deeper orthography – context may help readers phonologically and semantically disambiguate words whose letters do not provide enough information for grapheme‐to‐phoneme conversion. It is hypothesised that bilingual English‐Hebrew participants would rely more upon context for oral reading of Hebrew than English and that in Hebrew, reading words which are more phonologically ambiguous (high degree of freedom words) would be more affected by context than reading of words which are less phonologically ambiguous (low degree of freedom words). Results support both hypotheses. The findings are consistent with the Orthographic Depth Hypothesis.