Does the Visual Attention Span Play a Role in Reading in Arabic?

Published online: 16 Jan 2018.It is unclear whether the association between the visual attention (VA) span and reading differs across languages. Here we studied this relationship in Arabic, where the use of specific reading strategies depends on the amount of diacritics on words: reading vowelized and nonvowelized Arabic scripts favor sublexical and lexical strategies, respectively. We hypothesized that the size of the VA span and its association to reading would differ depending on individual “script preferences.” We compared children who were more proficient in reading fully vowelized Arabic than nonvowelized Arabic (VOW) to children for whom the opposite was true (NOVOW). NOVOW children showed a crowding effect in the VA span task, whereas VOW children did not. Moreover, the crowding in the VA span task correlated with the reading performance in the NOVOW group only. These results are discussed in light of individual differences on the use of reading strategies in Arabic.This report was made possible by a National Priorities Research Program award (Grant NPRP No. 6-378-5–035) from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of The Qatar Foundation)

The effect of printed word attributes on Arabic reading

Printed Arabic texts usually contain no short vowels and therefore a single letter string can often be associated with two or more distinct pronunciations and meanings. The high level of homography is believed to present difficulties for the skilled reader. However, this is the first study to gather empirical evidence on what readers know about the different words that can be associated with each homograph. There are few studies of the effects of psycholinguistic variables on Arabic word naming and lexical decision. The present work therefore involved the creation of a database of 1,474 unvowelised letter strings, which was used to undertake four studies. The first study presented lists of unvowelised letter strings and asked participants to produce the one or more word forms (with short vowels) evoked by each target. Responses to 1,474 items were recorded from 445 adult speakers of Arabic. The number of different vowelised forms associated with each letter string and the percentage agreement were calculated. The second study collected subjective Age-of-Acquisition ratings from 89 different participants for the agreed vowelised form of each letter string. The third study asked 38 participants to produce pronunciation responses to 1,474 letter strings. Finally, 40 different participants were asked to produce lexical decisions to 1,352 letter strings and 1,352 matched non-word letter strings. Mixed-effects models showed that orthographic frequency, Age-of-Acquisition and name agreement influenced word naming, while lexical decision was not affected by name agreement. Findings indicate that lexical decision in Arabic requires recognition of a basic shared morphemic structure, whereas word naming requires identification of a unique phonological representation. It takes longer to name a word when there are more possible pronunciations. The Age-of-Acquisition effect is consistent with a developmental theory of reading

English speakers' common orthographic errors in Arabic as L2 writing system : an analytical case study

PhD ThesisThe research involving Arabic Writing System (WS) is quite limited. Yet, researching writing errors of L2WS Arabic against a certain L1WS seems to be relatively neglected. This study attempts to identify, describe, and explain common orthographic errors in Arabic writing amongst English-speaking learners. First, it outlines the Arabic Writing System’s (AWS) characteristics and available empirical studies of L2WS Arabic. This study embraced the Error Analysis approach, utilising a mixed-method design that deployed quantitative and qualitative tools (writing tests, questionnaire, and interview). The data were collected from several institutions around the UK, which collectively accounted for 82 questionnaire responses, 120 different writing samples from 44 intermediate learners, and six teacher interviews. The hypotheses for this research were; a) English-speaking learners of Arabic make common orthographic errors similar to those of Arabic native speakers; b) English-speaking learners share several common orthographic errors with other learners of Arabic as a second/foreign language (AFL); and c) English-speaking learners of Arabic produce their own common orthographic errors which are specifically related to the differences between the two WSs. The results confirmed all three hypotheses. Specifically, English-speaking learners of L2WS Arabic commonly made six error types: letter ductus (letter shape), orthography (spelling), phonology, letter dots, allographemes (i.e. letterform), and direction. Gemination and L1WS transfer error rates were not found to be major. Another important result showed that five letter groups in addition to two letters are particularly challenging to English-speaking learners. Study results indicated that error causes were likely to be from one of four factors: script confusion, orthographic difficulties, phonological realisation, and teaching/learning strategies. These results are generalizable as the data were collected from several institutions in different parts of the UK. Suggestions and implications as well as recommendations for further research are outlined accordingly in the conclusion chapter

Reading in Arabic Script: A Cross-Linguistic and Cross-National Study

The current study examined within- and cross-language predictors of word reading and reading comprehension among groups of Arabic-English bilingual children in different language learning environments. A total of 80 children were tested, forty Arabic-English bilingual children recruited from Saudi Arabia and forty Arabic-English bilingual children were recruited from Canada. Both groups completed parallel measures of word-level reading, reading comprehension and vocabulary in Arabic and English. Results indicated that the underlying components related to within- and cross-language word reading and reading comprehension varied across groups. Within-language results demonstrate that English morphological awareness was significantly related to English word reading in both the Saudi and the Canadian groups. Vocabulary knowledge and word reading were significantly related to English reading comprehension across groups. Vocabulary knowledge was the only variable explaining unique variance in Arabic reading comprehension literary form for the Canadian group, as well as explaining unique variance in Arabic reading comprehension of the spoken form for both groups. Cross-language results demonstrate that Arabic un-vowelized word reading explained unique variance in English word reading for both groups. English phonological awareness explained a unique variance in Arabic vowelized word reading for both groups

The effect of orthographic systems on the developing reading system:Typological and computational analyses

Orthographic systems vary dramatically in the extent to which they encode a language’s phonological and lexico-semantic structure. Studies of the effects of orthographic transparency suggest that such variation is likely to have major implications for how the reading system operates. However, such studies have been unable to examine in isolation the contributory effect of transparency on reading because of covarying linguistic or sociocultural factors. We first investigated the phonological properties of languages using the range of the world’s orthographic systems (alphabetic, alphasyllabic, consonantal, syllabic, and logographic), and found that, once geographical proximity is taken into account, phonological properties do not relate to orthographic system. We then explored the processing implications of orthographic variation by training a connectionist implementation of the triangle model of reading on the range of orthographic systems while controlling for phonological and semantic structure. We show that the triangle model is effective as a universal model of reading, able to replicate key behavioral and neuroscientific results. The model also generates new predictions deriving from an explicit description of the effects of orthographic transparency on how reading is realized and defines the consequences of orthographic systems on reading processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved

Selective Neural Entrainment Reveals Hierarchical Tuning to Linguistic Regularities in Reading

Reading is both a visual and a linguistic task, and as such it relies on both general-purpose, visual mechanisms and more abstract, meaning-oriented processes. Disentangling the roles of these resources is of paramount importance in reading research. The present study capitalizes on the coupling of Fast Periodic Visual Stimulation (FPVS; Rossion, 2014) and MEG recordings to address this issue and investigate the role of dierent kinds of visual and linguistic units in the visual word identification system. We compared strings of pseudo-characters (BACS; C. Vidal & Chetail, 2017); strings of consonants (e.g,. sfcl); readable, but unattested strings (e.g., amsi); frequent, but non-meaningful chunks (e.g., idge); suffixes (e.g., ment); and words (e.g., vibe); and looked for discrimination responses with a particular focus on the ventral, occipito-temporal regions. The results revealed sensitivity to alphabetic, readable, familiar and lexical stimuli. Interestingly, there was no discrimination between suffixes and equally frequent, but meaningless endings, thus highlighting a lack of sensitivity to semantics. Taken together, the data suggest that the visual word identification system, at least in its early processing stages, is particularly tuned to form-based regularities, most likely reflecting its reliance on general-purpose, statistical learning mechanisms that are a core feature of the visual system as implemented in the ventral stream

Orthographic Learning in Arabic-Speaking Primary School Students

The aim of this study was to examine how Arabic-speaking children construct orthographic representations and to identify cognitive/linguistic abilities that may facilitate novel word learning. The research involved first examining factors associated with single word reading and spelling accuracy in Arabic-speaking monolingual children and Arabic-English bilingual children, in order to separate universal from script-dependent predictors. Because Arabic is diglossic (i.e., two varieties of the language, one spoken, and one for literary purposes), it was considered important to include print exposure as a measure in investigating factors associated with single word reading and spelling. Thus, Study 1 involved the development of Title Recognition Tests (TRT) in Arabic and in English. Participants were children from grades three to five; 86 students participated in the development of the lists in Study 1a, and 76 in the development of the revised lists in Study 1b. Both lists were reliable and were used in the subsequent studies. Study 2 involved examining predictors of single word reading and spelling (receptive vocabulary, phonological processing, RAN, TRT, and orthographic matching) in 86 third- to fifth-grade bilingual children and 116 third-grade monolingual children. For the bilinguals, PA emerged as the strongest predictor of reading and spelling in Arabic. In English, verbal STM and orthographic matching were predictors for the younger bilinguals. PA was the strongest predictor of reading and spelling for the monolinguals. In Study 3, novel word learning in Arabic was examined using a paired-associate learning task, orthography present or absent and varying visual complexity (ligature and diacritics). The 116 monolingual children from Study 2 participated. Child-related predictors of novel word learning were examined. Results revealed that presence of orthography facilitated learning. There was evidence that consonant diacritics are a source of difficulty, but diglossic phonemes may also be responsible for reading difficulties documented in Arabic

The morphological complexity of L1 Arabic-speaking children

Spelling poses a challenge to Arabic-speaking learners due to the complexity of the morphological and orthographic system in Arabic. Arabic morphology has been argued to play a critical role in spelling since its morphological operations are built on a system consisting of a root that is interlocking into different patterns of vowels to form different categories of words. In addition, Arabic orthography is considered to be loyal to the morphographic principle (Ravid, 2012), where morphemes correspond to graphic representation regardless of the pronunciation, especially in the non-vowelized texts. This study made a detailed classification of spelling errors in a word dictation task, based on morphological structures, undertaken by 107 Typically-developing learners (TD) and learners with learning disabiities (LD) attending the same schools. All participants ranged in age from 7 years, 3 months to 15 years, 2 months (grades 2 to 8). The spelling task was made up of 400 common words representing all morphological forms in different conjugations and grammatical classes. The results indicated that learners made three types of errors: errors with respect to the root, errors with respect to the word pattern, and errors with respect to both the root and the word pattern. The results also showed that TD and LD learners follow a similar pattern of complexity even though the LD group produced more errors than the TD group. The results revealed that MA and PA exhibited significant positive regression (b= 9.398, 16.106 respectively) with spelling, indicating that learners with higher scores in PA and MA have higher scores in spelling. The results argued for the crucial contribution that morphological awareness makes towards the general spelling abilities among learners and provide additional evidence for the nonlinear growth of morphological knowedge in spelling. In addition, spelling errors suggested that the spelling process goes in a hierarchical way where words can be accessed and processed either according to the root or according to the stem. Intact verbs are processed according to their root and word pattern. Some weak verb forms, whose radicals undergo modifications, are processed according to their stem, while those whose radicals are fully represented in the spoken word, are processed according to their root and word patterns. Therefore, roots or stems are firstly accessed and attached to basic word patterns (the grapheme without diacritics and affixes). Thereafter, prefixes and, then, suffixes are attached to the word pattern and, finally, diacritics are accessed and attached to the word pattern

VISUAL ORTHOGRAPHIC VARIATION AND LEARNING TO READ ACROSS WRITING SYSTEMS

This research examined the extent to which visual characteristics of orthographies affect learning to read within and across writing systems, with an eye toward the role of mapping principles – the manner in which graphemes map to linguistic units (e.g., phonemes, syllables, and morphemes) in this process. Study 1 explained visual orthographic variation by developing a measurement system to quantify complexity of graphemes in 131 orthographies. The results show that grapheme complexity varies across writing systems and that this variation is driven by grapheme inventory, a consequence of mapping principles. Next, we questioned how visual orthographic variation impacts individuals’ perceptual learning of graphemes – one of the initial stages of learning to read. Study 2 tested the degree to which mastering first-language (L1) graphemes with different complexities affects visual perceptual discrimination for individuals using different mapping principles (Online cross-writing-system experiment; eight participant groups: Hebrew, English, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Telugu, Japanese, and Chinese, n = 60, respectively) and individuals using the same mapping principle (Lab within-writing-system experiment: simplified vs. traditional Chinese, n = 60, respectively). Consistent results from both experiments show that discrimination difficulty is a function of grapheme stimulus complexity itself as well as its relationship to the complexity of participants’ L1, regardless of mapping principles. These results were confirmed in Study 3, in which we developed a universal orthographic neural network encoder focus on statistical properties of visual patterns to simulate human behaviors. We trained each of 131 identical encoders to learn the structure of a different orthography; a strong, positive association was found between grapheme complexity and network learning difficulty. Taken together, our results suggest that visual orthographic variation, encompassing both grapheme complexity and grapheme inventory required for orthographic mastery, affects visual discrimination processing of graphemes; these complexity effects are driven significantly, but not absolutely, by mapping principles across writing systems