ABSTRACT

The term Modern Hebrew in the context of this book refers to the Hebrew language that is spoken today in Israel. This language, as well as its writing system, has a long history (see chapters 5, 6, and 8). In addition, as a Semitic language, it has a unique word structure. In this introduction I briefly discuss basic facts about Modern Hebrew, before moving on in the next chapters to discuss psycholinguistic research on reading Hebrew. For a broader introduction to selected issues, I refer the reader to the second part of this book.