To investigate the visual processing of the abjad writing, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while a native speaker of Hebrew silently read the six stimuli in Table 1. The ERPs showed that the stimuli with vowel points produced a larger negativity peaking around 170 ms (N170) than those without vowel points (1), and that the stimulus containing two morphemes (Stimulus 4 in Table 1) produced a larger N170 than the one with a single morpheme (Stimulus 1 in Table 1) even though they are visually identical (2). (1) was probably due to the fact that the stimuli with vowel points are visually more complex and requires more extensive visual processing. (2) suggests that the number of morphemes within a visual stimulus affects the amplitude of N170. This supports our hypothesis that the abjad writing is neither “a segmental script which ignores vowel segments” (Sampson 1985: 82) nor “defective alphabets” (Coulmas 1996:91) but designates morphological units such as roots and morphemes.