Effects of word predictability on eye movements during Arabic reading

Abstract

Contextual predictability influences both the probability and duration of eye fixations on words when reading Latinate alphabetic scripts like English and German. However, it is unknown whether word predictability influences eye movements in reading similarly for Semitic languages like Arabic, which are alphabetic languages with very different visual and linguistic characteristics. Such knowledge is nevertheless important for establishing the generality of mechanisms of eye-movement control across different alphabetic writing systems. Accordingly, we investigated word predictability effects in Arabic in two eye-movement experiments. Both produced shorter fixation times for words with high compared to low predictability, consistent with previous findings. Predictability did not influence skipping probabilities for (four- to eight-letter) words of varying length and morphological complexity (Experiment 1). However, it did for short (three- to four-letter) words with simpler structures (Experiment 2). We suggest that word-skipping is reduced, and affected less by contextual predictability, in Arabic compared to Latinate alphabetic reading, because of specific orthographic and morphological characteristics of the Arabic script.

Visual similarity effects in the identification of Arabic letters: evidence with masked priming

“…The idea is that there would be a dense perceptual space in Arabic words, which would decrease masked priming effects (see Forster & Taft, 1994, for evidence of how dense lexical space diminishes masked priming effects). It should be noted that visual similarity effects in the Latin script are transient and disappear at later processing stages, as reported in previous studies (e.g., see Gutiérrez-Sigut et al, 2019, using electrophysiological measures; see also AlJassmi et al, 2022, for evidence in sentence reading).…”

“…Despite the null effect of visual letter similarity, a significant advantage was observed in the identity priming condition. A similar pattern was observed in a parallel manipulation using parafoveal previews during silent sentence reading in Arabic (AlJassmi et al, 2020).…”

“…Specifically, we pose the question: can visual letter similarity effects, consistently observed in Latin script studies, also be observed in Arabic? We selected Arabic for this study because, unlike the Roman script, previous research on word processing in Arabic has consistently failed to reveal visual letter similarity effects (e.g., AlJassmi et al, 2020;Perea et al, 2016Perea et al, , 2018).…”

“…). The next question that arises is why these visual similarity effects are not observed during word recognition in masked priming paradigms (Perea et al, 2016(Perea et al, , 2018 and sentence reading parafoveal preview paradigms (AlJassmi et al, 2020).…”

Frequency and Predictability Effects for Line Final Words

“…Reading times are shorter on highly frequent words (Angele et al, 2014;Inhoff & Rayner, 1986, Just & Carpenter, 1980Kliegl et al, 2004;Miellet et al, 2007;Rayner et al, 2004;Rayner & Duffy, 1986;Slattery et al, 2007Slattery et al, , 2012Whitford & Titone, 2014). Reading times are also shorter on words that are highly predictable from the preceding sentence context (AlJassmi et al, 2022;Balota et al, 1985;Erlich & Rayner, 1981;Gollan et al, 2011;Rayner et al, 2011;Rayner & Well, 1996;Slattery & Yates, 2018). Moreover, the probability of fixating a word is influenced by its frequency and predictability, with highly predictable words receiving greater skipping rates during first-pass reading (Brysbaert et al, 2005).…”