Abstract
This study investigated the effect of vowels and context on the reading accuracy of poor and skilled native Arabic readers in reading paragraphs, sentences, and words. Central to this study is the belief that reading theory today should consider additional variables, especially when explaining the reading process in Arabic orthography among poor and normal/skilled readers. This orthography has not been studied. Reading theory today is the sum of conclusions from studies conducted in Latin orthography. The subjects were 77 native Arabic speakers, 34 of them poor readers and 44 normal/skilled readers. The subjects had to read in Arabic 15 paragraphs, 60 sentences, and 210 words. There were three reading conditions: fully vowelized, partially vowelized, and unvowelized texts. The results showed that vowels and contexts were important variables to facilitate word recognition in poor and normal/skilled readers in Arabic orthography.
Similar content being viewed by others
REFERENCES
Abu-Rabia, S. (in press). The need for cross-cultural considerations in reading theory: The effect of Arabic sentence context in normal and poor readers. Journal of Research in Reading.
Abu-Rabia, S., & Siegel, L. S. (1995). Different orthographies, different context effects: The effects of Arabic sentence context in skilled and poor readers. Reading Psychology, 16, 1–19.
Adams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. London, England: MIT Press.
Balota, D. A., & Chumbley, J. I. (1984). Are lexical decisions a good measure of lexical access? The role of word frequency in the neglected decision stage. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 10, 340–357.
Balota, D. A., & Chumbley, J. I. (1985). The locus of word-frequency effect in the pronunciation task: Lexical access and/or production. Journal of Memory and Languages, 24, 89–106.
Becker, C. A. (1985). What do we really know about semantic context effects during reading? In D. Besner, T. Waller, & G. Mackinnon (Eds.), Reading research: Advances in theory and practice (pp. 125–166). New York: Academic Press.
Bentin, S. (1989). Orthography and phonology in lexical decisions: Evidence from repetition effects at different lags. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 15, 61–72.
Briggs, P., Austin, S., & Underwood, G. (1984). The effects of sentence context in good and poor readers: A test of Stanovich's interactive-compensatory models. Reading Research Quarterly, 10, 54–61.
Bruck, M. (1990). Word-recognition skills of adults with childhood diagnoses of dyslexia. Developmental Psychology, 26, 439–454.
Chen, H. C. (1987). Character detection in reading Chinese: Effect of context display format. Chinese Journal of Psychology, 29, 45–50.
Chen, H. C. (1992). Reading comprehension in Chinese: Implications from character reading times. In H. C. Chen & O. J. L. Tzeng (Eds.), Language processing in Chinese (pp. 175–205). Elsevier Science Publishers.
Frost, R., & Bentin, S. (1992). Processing phonological and semantic ambiguity: Evidence from semantic priming at different SOAs. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 18, 58–68.
Frost, R., Katz, R., & Bentin, S. (1987). Strategies for visual word recognition and orthographical depth: A multilingual comparison. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 13, 104–111.
Goodman, K. S. (1976). Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game. In H. Singer & R. Ruddle (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of reading (pp. 497–508). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
Haywood, J. A., & Nahmad, H. M. (1965). The Arabic language: A new Arabic grammar of the written language. London, England: Percy Lund, Humphries.
Just, M. A., & Carpenter, P. A. (1980). A theory of reading: From eye-fixations to comprehension. Psychological Review, 4, 329–354.
Just, M. A., & Carpenter, P. A. (1987). The psychology of reading and language comprehension. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Koriat, A. (1984). Reading without vowels: Lexical access in Hebrew. In H. Bouma & D. G. Bouwhuis (Eds.), Attention and Performance: Control of Language Processes. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Koriat, A. (1985). Lexical access for low and high frequency words in Hebrew. Memory & Cognition, 13, 378–44.
Navon, D., & Shimron, J. (1981). Does word naming involve grapheme-to-phoneme translation? Evidence from Hebrew. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 20, 97–109.
Navon, D., & Shimron, J. (1984). Reading Hebrew: How necessary is graphemic representation of vowels? In L. Henderson (Ed.), Orthographies and reading. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Perfetti, C. A. (1985). Reading ability. New York: Oxford University Press.
Perfetti, C. A., & Roth, S. (1981). Some of the interactive processes in reading and their role in reading skill. In A. Ledsgold & C. Perfetti (Eds.), Interactive processes in reading (pp. 269–297). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Pollatsek, A., Rayner, K., & Balota, D. A. (1986). Inferences about eye movement control from the perceptual span in reading. Perception and Psychophysics, 40, 123–130.
Ryan, A., & Meara, P. (1991). The case of the invisible vowels: Arabic speakers reading English words. Reading in a Foreign Language, 7, 531–541.
Schwantes, P. M. (1985). Expectancy, integration, and interactional processes: Age differences in the nature of words affected by sentence context. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 39, 212–229.
Seidenberg, M. S., & McClelland, J. L. (1989). A distributed, developmental model of word recognition and naming. Psychological Review, 96, 523–568.
Shimron, J. (1993). The role of vowels in reading: A review of studies in English and Hebrew. Psychological Bulletin, 114, 52–67.
Shimron, J., & Sivan, T. (1994). Reading proficiency and orthography: Evidence from Hebrew and English. Language Learning, 44, 5–27.
Simpon, G. B., & Foster, M. R. (1986). Lexical ambiguity and children's word recognition. Developmental Psychology, 22, 147–154.
Smith, F. (1979). Reading without nonsense. New York: Teachers College Press.
Stanovich, K. E. (1980). Toward an interactive-compensatory model of individual differences in the development of reading fluency. Reading Research Quarterly, 16, 32–71.
Stanovich, K. E. (1982). Individual differences in the cognitive processes in reading: II. Text level processes. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 15, 549–554.
Stanovich, K. E. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 4, 360–407.
Stanovich, K. E. (1992). The psychology of reading: Evolutionary and revolutionary developments. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 12, 13–30.
Stanovich, K. E., & Feeman, D. J. (1981). A longitudinal study of sentence context effects in second-grade children: Tests of an interactive-compensatory model. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 32, 185–199.
Van Orden, G. C., Pennington, B. F., & Stone, G. O. (1990). Word identification in reading and the promise of subsymbolic psycholinguistics. Psychological Review, 97, 488–522.
West, R. F., & Stanovich, K. E. (1978). Automatic contextual facilitation in readers of three ages. Child Development, 49, 717–727.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Abu-Rabia, S. Reading in Arabic Orthography: The Effect of Vowels and Context on Reading Accuracy of Poor and Skilled Native Arabic Readers in Reading Paragraphs, Sentences, and Isolated Words. J Psycholinguist Res 26, 465–482 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1025034220924
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1025034220924