Diacritics convey vowel sounds in Arabic, allowing accurate word pronunciation.Mostly, modern Arabic is printed non-diacritised. Otherwise, diacritics appear either only on homographic words when not disambiguated by surrounding text or on all words as in religious or educational texts. In an eye tracking experiment we examined sentence processing in the absence of diacritics, and when diacritics were presented in either modes. Heterophonic-homographic were embedded in temporarily ambiguous sentences where in the absence of diacritics, readers cannot be certain whether the verb was active or passive. Passive sentences were disambiguated by an extra word (e.g., ‫بيد‬ /b i j a d/, by the hand of). Our results show that readers benefitted from the disambiguating diacritics when present only on the homographic verb. When disambiguating diacritics were absent, Arabic readers followed their parsing preference for active verb analysis, and garden path effects were observed. When reading fully diacritised sentences, readers incurred only a small cost, likely due to increased visual crowding, but did not extensively process the (mostly superfluous) diacritics, thus resulting in a lack of benefit from the disambiguating diacritics on the passive verb.Keywords: diacritics, reading Arabic, eye movements, garden path, parsing preferenceReading in a number of the world's languages has been studied using the methodology of tracking readers' eye movements (see e.g. Rayner, 1998;2009 the role of vowel phonology in Arabic in the computation of syntactic structure, and the construction of semantic representations). In addition, these unique properties allow us to pose novel questions concerning written language processing in general.Eye tracking is a non-intrusive way of studying the cognitive processes associated with reading since readers' eye movements are tightly linked with these processes (e.g., Liversedge & Findlay, 2000;Rayner, 1998;2009). The research reported here used eye-tracking methodology to explore readers'processing of Arabic vowel phonology, and whether, and how, this phonological processing interacts with syntactic processing.Arabic is an alphabetic language, which, like Hebrew, is written and read from right to left. Also like Hebrew, letters mainly denote consonant sounds, whereas short vowels are denoted by diacritical marks (diacritics hereafter, see Abu-Rabia, 2002;Haywood & Nahmad, 1965; Schulz, 2004), which are added to the written letters.This vowel information has the potential to disambiguate the pronunciation of words 1984; Bentin & Frost, 1987; Koriat, 1984); and offline measures in text reading tasks (e.g. reading speed and accuracy, or comprehension measures, e.g. Abu-Rabia, 1997a;1997b;. Some studies have suggested that the presence of diacritics contributes to improved reading accuracy and comprehension. Abu-Rabia (1997a), for instance, presented readers with single words, sentences and paragraphs, which were diacritised, or non-diacritised. The readers were 10th grade (about 16 years ...

The authors conducted 2 eye movement experiments in which they used the typographical and linguistic properties of Arabic to disentangle the influences of words’ number of letters and spatial extent on measures of fixation duration and saccade targeting (Experiment 1), and to investigate the influence of initial bigram characteristics on saccade targeting during reading (Experiment 2). In the first experiment, through the use of a proportional font, which is more natural-looking in Arabic compared to monospaced fonts, the authors manipulated the number of letters (5 vs. 7) and the spatial extent (wide vs. narrow) of words embedded in frame sentences. The results obtained replicate and expand upon previous findings in other alphabetic languages that the number of letters influences fixation durations, whereas saccade targeting (as indicated by measures of fixation count and probability of skipping and refixation) is more influenced by the word’s spatial extent. In the second experiment, the authors compared saccade targeting measures (saccade amplitude and initial fixation location) in 6- and 7-letter words beginning with initial bigrams that were of extremely high frequency (ال the), relatively high frequency (لل to/for the), or beginning with the letters of the word stem. The results showed negligible modulation of saccade targeting by initial bigram characteristics. The results also highlighted the importance of selecting the appropriate measures of initial fixation location (spatial vs. character-based measures) during reading text rendered using proportional fonts.

General rightsThis document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. Full terms of use are available: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/pure/about/ebr-terms

The effectiveness of tablet computers to supplement or replace paper-based text in everyday life has yet to be fully revealed. Previous investigations comparing reading performance using tablets and paper have, however, reported inconsistent results. Furthermore, the interpretability of some previous findings is limited by lack of experimental control over variables like text display conditions. In the current study, we investigated reading performance for text presented on tablet and paper. Crucially, the levels of luminance and contrast were matched precisely across tablet and paper. The study used Arabic text which differs substantially from the languages used previously to investigate effects of tablet and paper on reading, thus offering a distinctive test of the influence of these two media on reading performance. The results suggest that when text display conditions are well-matched, there is no reliable difference in reading performance between the two media. Also, neither the order of medium (reading from tablet or paper first), nor familiarity with using a tablet significantly influence reading performance. These results call into question previous suggestions that reading from tablets is linked to poorer reading performance, and demonstrate the benefits of controlling text display conditions. These findings are of interest to reading scientists and educators.

One of the most studied and robust effects in the reading literature is that of word frequency.Semitic words (e.g., in Arabic or Hebrew) contain roots that indicate the core meaning to which the word belongs. The effects of the frequency of these roots on reading as measured by eye movements is much less understood. In a series of experiments, we investigated and replicated traditional word frequency effects in Arabic: Eye movement measures showed the expected facilitation for high-over low-frequency target words embedded in sentences (Experiment 1). The same was found in response time and accuracy in a lexical decision task (Experiment 3a). Using target words that were matched on overall orthographic frequency and other important variables, but that contained either high-or low-frequency roots, we found no significant influence of root frequency on eye movement measures during sentence reading (Experiment 2). Using the same target words in a lexical decision task (Experiment 3b), we replicated the absence of root frequency effects on real Arabic word processing. At first glance, the results may not appear to be in line with theoretical accounts that postulate early morphological decomposition and root identification when processing Semitic words.However, these results are compatible with accounts where morphological decomposition does occur but is followed by re-combination, and under certain conditions re-combination costs can eliminate or even reverse root frequency effects.