A Comparative Study: How We Read in Arabic and French

Román, Gipsis Suárez; Pavard, Bernard

doi:10.1016/b978-0-444-70113-8.50064-3

Cited by 39 publications

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“…unpointed script is further supported by the finding that readers were significantly slowed down by the introduction of vowel diacritics in passages of Hebrew and Arabic text (Frost, 1994;Roman & Pavard, 1987). These results suggest that the inclusion of vowels induces readers of these languages to adopt the slower indirect access route.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 71%

“…Such findings led to the view that readers of shallow orthographies like SerboCroatian or Italian rely extensively on a phonological assembly route, whereas readers of deep orthographies, such as unvoweled Arabic and Hebrew, predominantly use a direct access route in word recognition (Frost et al, 1987;Roman & Pavard, 1987;Tabossi & Laghi, 1992). That is to say, the faithful representation of word phonology in spelling encourages readers of shallow orthographies to convert spelling to sound, which then provides access to meaning.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Orthographic characteristics speed Hindi word naming but slow Urdu naming: evidence from Hindi/Urdu biliterates

et al. 2010

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Two primed naming experiments tested the orthographic depth hypothesis in skilled biliterate readers of Hindi and Urdu. These languages are very similar on the spoken level but differ greatly in script; Hindi is a highly transparent script, whereas Urdu is more opaque. It was accordingly hypothesized that formbased priming would be greater for Hindi than Urdu, reflecting greater reliance on a phonological assembly route in the more transparent Hindi script. Proficient Hindi/ Urdu biliterate readers were presented with primes either in Hindi or Urdu script (Exp. 1), or in Roman transcription (Exp. 2), while targets were always in blocks of Hindi or Urdu. Across both experiments, form-based priming was observed only in Hindi. Additionally, target words were named significantly faster and better in Hindi than in Urdu. The results are taken as support for the hypothesis of differential reliance on phonological assembly as a function of script transparency. Further, the greater graphemic complexity of Urdu script relative to Hindi appears to have contributed to slower and less accurate overall single word reading for Urdu than Hindi, despite the fact that Urdu was the first learned script.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 71%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Orthographic characteristics speed Hindi word naming but slow Urdu naming: evidence from Hindi/Urdu biliterates

et al. 2010

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“…They reported interactive effects for first and single fixation and gaze durations such that readers spent about 9-11 ms longer fixating low frequency characters of high complexity relative to characters in all the other conditions. Arguably, increased visual complexity due to the presence of diacritics could result in similar effects for Arabic sentence reading; this is what Roman and Pavard (1987) termed perceptual noise. The amount of visual information in fully diacritised sentences is clearly increased relative to the same sentence in its non-diacritised form.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Note also, that when only an ambiguous word is diacritised in a sentence, and not the entire sentence as per the Roman and Pavard (1987) study, and participants were required to read sentences aloud, readers were very accurate (almost at ceiling level) in their pronunciations compared with when these verbs are not diacritised (Roman et al, 1985). However, again it is not clear whether processing of diacritics in this situation is influenced by the task demand of reading aloud (see also Abu-Rabia, 1997b;2001; or in Hebrew word naming tasks e.g., Bentin & Frost, 1987) compared to normal silent reading.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…In other words, it is clear from this example that in addition to providing phonological information, diacritics also provide information about the syntactic status of a letter string, which can potentially serve as reading? Roman and Pavard (1987) tracked native Arabic readers' eye movements while silently reading passages of text (about 95 words) which were either fully-or non-diacritised. They reported that the presence of full text diacritics resulted in a significant reduction in reading speed, as well as significant increases in the number of fixations made and the duration of fixations.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Processing of Arabic diacritical marks: Phonological–syntactic disambiguation of homographic verbs and visual crowding effects.

Hermena¹,

Drieghe²,

Hellmuth³

et al. 2015

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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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 ...

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How Initial Fixation Position Influences Visual Word Recognition: A Comparison of French and Arabic

1996

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A Comparative Study: How We Read in Arabic and French

Cited by 39 publications

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Orthographic characteristics speed Hindi word naming but slow Urdu naming: evidence from Hindi/Urdu biliterates

Orthographic characteristics speed Hindi word naming but slow Urdu naming: evidence from Hindi/Urdu biliterates

Processing of Arabic diacritical marks: Phonological–syntactic disambiguation of homographic verbs and visual crowding effects.

How Initial Fixation Position Influences Visual Word Recognition: A Comparison of French and Arabic

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