The impact of pointing on the short-term memory (STM) of heterophonic homographs

This study entailed two short-term memory (STM) experiments investigating the importance of vowel diacritics for the temporary retention of three distinct Hebrew word list types: heterophonic homographs, non-homographs and homophonic homographs. Eighty university students participated in each experiment, with half of them tested with word lists presented in fully pointed (voweled) Hebrew and the other half given the word lists in unpointed Hebrew (with vowel diacritics removed). In Experiment 1, all stimulus materials were presented in print script. Experiment 2 was an exact replication, except that stimulus materials were in cursive Hebrew. Findings from both experiments indicated that, overall, the presence of vowel diacritics had no facilitating effect on participants' quantitative or qualitative STM performance. In fact, when reading print script, pointing was found to be detrimental to STM recall for all three investigated word categories. Findings are discussed with respect to a dual-route reading model.