Does visual letter similarity modulate masked form priming in young readers of Arabic?

Available online 19 January 2018 Supplementary data associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jecp.2017.12.004.Supplementary data associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jecp.2017.12.004.We carried out a masked priming lexical decision experiment to study whether visual letter similarity plays a role during the initial phases of word processing in young readers of Arabic (fifth graders). Arabic is ideally suited to test these effects because most Arabic letters share their basic shape with at least one other letter and differ only in the number/position of diacritical points (e.g., ض - ص ;ظ - ط ;غ - ع ;ث - ت - ن ب ;ذ - د ;خ - ح - ج ;ق - ف ;ش - س ;ز - ر). We created two one-letter-different priming conditions for each target word, in which a letter from the consonantal root was substituted by another letter that did or did not keep the same shape (e.g., خدمة - حدمة vs. خدمة - فدمة). Another goal of the current experiment was to test the presence of masked orthographic priming effects, which are thought to be unreliable in Semitic languages. To that end, we included an unrelated priming condition. We found a sizable masked orthographic priming effect relative to the unrelated condition regardless of visual letter similarity, thereby revealing that young readers are able to quickly process the diacritical points of Arabic letters. Furthermore, the presence of masked orthographic priming effects in Arabic suggests that the word identification stream in Indo-European and Semitic languages is more similar than previously thought.This article was made possible by a National Priorities Research Program (NPRP) award (Grant No. 6-378-5-035z) from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of the Qatar Foundation)

Does visual letter similarity modulate masked form priming in young readers of Arabic?

Available online 19 January 2018 Supplementary data associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jecp.2017.12.004.Supplementary data associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jecp.2017.12.004.We carried out a masked priming lexical decision experiment to study whether visual letter similarity plays a role during the initial phases of word processing in young readers of Arabic (fifth graders). Arabic is ideally suited to test these effects because most Arabic letters share their basic shape with at least one other letter and differ only in the number/position of diacritical points (e.g., ض - ص ;ظ - ط ;غ - ع ;ث - ت - ن ب ;ذ - د ;خ - ح - ج ;ق - ف ;ش - س ;ز - ر). We created two one-letter-different priming conditions for each target word, in which a letter from the consonantal root was substituted by another letter that did or did not keep the same shape (e.g., خدمة - حدمة vs. خدمة - فدمة). Another goal of the current experiment was to test the presence of masked orthographic priming effects, which are thought to be unreliable in Semitic languages. To that end, we included an unrelated priming condition. We found a sizable masked orthographic priming effect relative to the unrelated condition regardless of visual letter similarity, thereby revealing that young readers are able to quickly process the diacritical points of Arabic letters. Furthermore, the presence of masked orthographic priming effects in Arabic suggests that the word identification stream in Indo-European and Semitic languages is more similar than previously thought.This article was made possible by a National Priorities Research Program (NPRP) award (Grant No. 6-378-5-035z) from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of the Qatar Foundation)

Patterns of Public Procurement Activity in Europe

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Data Science and Advanced Analytics, specialization in Data ScienceHow uniformly is public money being used over Europe? Ideally public Institutions and private companies would award and win respectively procurements proportionally to its population dimensions. Nevertheless, not all countries have the same status of development neither the same needs of investments across the entire continent which created the need of grouping countries, based on socio-economic and historical backgrounds, nominated geographical groups. Since there is no public standard institution to associate procurements and aggregate indicators, NUTS3 was used for the purpose, nominated as statistical units. It was found that all types of procurements scale super-linearly with population through all geographical groups adopted for the study. Additionally, the yearly variation of the slopes denotes a substantial growth in Western and Northern countries, corresponding to an increase in the public procurement volume per inhabitant not justified by population reduction nor inflation rate. A contrary tendency is verified in Southern countries, especially in works procurements. Lastly, procurement market, regardless of the contract actor and geographical group tends to have a significant presence of statistical units over-winning and under-winning compared to their geographical peers. These findings provide a method for assessing equality among similar statistical units and a framework for tackling potential misallocation of public investments

Cross-linguistic transfer in bilinguals reading in two alphabetic orthographies: The grain size accommodation hypothesis

Published online: 12 April 2017Reading acquisition is one of the most complex and demanding learning processes faced by children in their first years of schooling. If reading acquisition is challenging in one language, how is it when reading is acquired simultaneously in two languages? What is the impact of bilingualism on the development of literacy? We review behavioral and neuroimaging evidence from alphabetic writing systems suggesting that early bilingualism modulates reading development. Particularly, we show that cross-linguistic variations and cross-linguistic transfer affect bilingual reading strategies as well as their cognitive underpinnings. We stress the fact that the impact of bilingualism on literacy acquisition depends on the specific combination of languages learned and does not manifest itself similarly across bilingual populations. We argue that these differences can be explained by variations due to orthographic depth in the grain sizes used to perform reading and reading-related tasks. Overall, we propose novel hypotheses to shed light on the behavioral and neural variability observed in reading skills among bilinguals.This work was supported by the European commission (BILITERACY- SH4, ERC-2011-ADG) and the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, Madrid, Spain (Grant Nos. PSI20153653383P to M.L., PSI20153673533R to M.C., and SEV3201530490 to the Basque Center on Brain and Language Cognition)

Matrices of the frequency and similarity of Arabic letters and allographs

Published online: 19 February 2020Indicators of letter frequency and similarity have long been available for Indo-European languages. They have not only been pivotal in controlling the design of experimental psycholinguistic studies seeking to determine the factors that underlie reading ability and literacy acquisition, but have also been useful for studies examining the more general aspects of human cognition. Despite their importance, however, such indicators are still not available for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), a language that, by virtue of its orthographic system, presents an invaluable environment for the experimental investigation of visual word processing. This paper presents for the first time the frequencies of Arabic letters and their allographs based on a 40-million-word corpus, along with their similarity/confusability indicators in three domains: (1) the visual domain, based on human ratings; (2) the auditory domain, based on an analysis of the phonetic features of letter sounds; and (3) the motoric domain, based on an analysis of the stroke features used to write letters and their allographs. Taken together, the frequency and similarity of Arabic letters and their allographs in the visual and motoric domains, as well as the similarities among the letter sounds, will be useful for researchers interested in the processes underpinning orthographic processing, visual word recognition, reading, and literacy acquisition.This research was funded by two United Arab Emirates University College of Humanities and Social Sciences grants to Sami Boudelaa (G00002367 and G00003158)