In 2009, Dr. Tami Katzir was a senior lecturer at the Department of Learning Disabilities at the University of Haifa. Her research focused on reading development, reading breakdown and similarities of reading disabilities in various languages, including English, Hebrew and Spanish. In her 2009 GISHA Conference presentation on "U-Shaped Development: The Unique Challenges of Learning to Read in Hebrew" she noted that little research on the development of reading fluency among native Hebrew speakers had been done in comparison to the volumes of research on reading fluency for native English speakers.

English is considered to have a "deep orthography" because there are so many spelling exceptions. Hebrew is considered to have a "shallow orthography" when the diacritical vowel markings (nekudot) are in place. However, when nekudot are removed from Hebrew texts, such as in newspapers and most adult books and for children in the fourth grade and higher, Hebrew is considered to constitute a deep orthography, and as such, becomes harder to decode. At this point the reader must often rely on the context of a word in order to read and understand it correctly.

Katzir noted that "developmentally, the role of vowels in reading is extremely important in isolated word reading, and for novice readers." (T. Katzir, GISHA Conference PowerPoint presentation, April, 2009) Much of Katzir's research is more relevant to how native Hebrew speakers learn to read Hebrew, and how this might affect the development of curricular materials to match the cognitive needs of native Hebrew speakers. However, the finding about the importance of vowels in Hebrew orthography is relevant to this author's work in reformatting Hebrew texts. As will be shown, some of this author's work focuses on presenting Hebrew words broken into their constituent syllables to aid the novice reader in correct vocalization of the text. The vowels are key in determining where a syllable ends.