THE ROLE OF SHORT VOWELS AND CONTEXT IN THE READING OF ARABIC, COMPREHENSION AND WORD RECOGNITION OF HIGHLY SKILLED READERS

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of short vowels in reading Arabic for skilled Arab adult readers. Previous studies claimed that the presence of short vowels (and diacritics) has a facilitative role in the reading of Arabic. That is, adding short vowels to the consonants facilitates the reading comprehension and reading accuracy of both children and skilled adult Arab readers. Further, those studies claimed that the absence of short vowels (and diacritics) and context makes reading Arabic impossible. But these studies did not manipulate the short vowels and diacritics to the degree that would isolate the short vowels effect. Nor did they take into account the level of reading involved: text, sentence, and word. That is, on a text level, assessing the role of short vowels should take into account the text level in terms of word frequency; on a sentence level, the structure of the sentence- garden-path versus non-garden-path-; and finally, on a word level the type of word, homographic versus nonhomographic. Thus, the study described in the following pages was designed with three tasks to assess the role of short vowels in relation to each level: the text frequency, the garden-path structure, and the homography aspect of the word. In general, the results showed that the presence or absence of short vowels and diacritics in combination do not affect the reading process, comprehension, and accuracy of skilled adult Arab readers. However, only in a word-naming task, the absence of short vowels and context prevented the skilled adult Arab reader from choosing the right form of the heterophonic homographic word. Further, according to the findings, at the absence of short vowels and diacritics in combination, the role of context in Arabic is still limited to the heterophonic homographic words. In sum, the results demonstrated that the only variable that affects the reading process of Adult Arab skilled readers is the word frequency. Justification for such effects and recommendations for pedagogical purposes and future research are suggested

Short Vowels Versus Word Familiarity in the Reading Comprehension of Arab Readers: A Revisited Issue

Arab readers, both beginning and advanced, are encouraged to read and accustomed to unvowelized and undiacriticized texts. Previous literature claimed that the presence of short vowels in the text would facilitate the reading comprehension of both beginning and advanced Arab readers. However, with a claimed strict controlling procedure, different results emerged, revealing that the only variable that affected the reading process of Arab adult skilled readers was word frequency, and its effect was limited to the time load of the reading process; this result raised the question of whether the neutral role of short vowels in the text reading process of experienced Arab readers would be maintained for less experienced readers, as represented by fourth graders, or whether word frequency would be the only variable that plays a role in their reading process. In experiment, 1,141 fourth-grade students were randomly assigned to 5 reading conditions: plain, only shaddah, short vowels plus shaddah, only short vowels, and finally the wrong short vowels plus shaddah. In experiment 2, 38 participants from the same population were assigned to a fully vowelized and diacriticized reading condition. Each participant was asked to read two texts, of high and low frequency words and then given recall and multiple-choice tests. In general, the multivariate analysis showed that the only manipulated variable that was found to affect their reading process in terms of reading time load and, to some degree, reading comprehension was word frequency, although its effect was marginal. Accordingly, pedagogical recommendations and future research were proposed