ABSTRACT
The odd thing about reading contemporary Hebrew (and Arabic) is that skilled readers can read two orthographies more or less equally well. One orthography contains vowel signs in the form of diacritics (nekudot ‘points’), hence it represents all phonemes (the minimal units that represent speech sound of a language), in fact, with some redundancy. The other specifies few, if any, vowel signs, and most consonants. In this chapter we look at the psychological implications of reading with the complete or partial phonological information given by the two orthographies. We also check if different reading strategies can be applied to reading each of them.
