Abstract
Previous research has shown that reading in Arabic is a slower process than reading in other languages, even among skilled native Arabic speakers. In addition, the process of reading acquisition by beginning readers is slower than in other languages. We present three possible sources of these phenomena from both a psycholinguistic and a neuropsychological perspective. We examine the effects of diglossia (the fact that children learn to read a language in which they are not fluent), and the visual characteristics of Arabic orthography on reading acquisition, and suggest that the particular combination of grapheme-phoneme relations and visual characteristics of Arabic orthography result in a specific reading strategy among skilled readers that involves the cerebral hemispheres differently in Arabic than in Hebrew or English.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Abdulhadi, S., Ibrahim, R., & Eviatar. Z. (2011). Perceptual load in the reading of Arabic: Effects of orthographic visual complexity on detection. Writing SystemsResearch, 3(2), 117–127.
Abu-Rabia, S. (2001). The role of vowels in reading Semitic scripts: Data from Arabic and Hebrew. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 14, 39–59.
Aghababian, V., & Nazir, T. A. (2000). Developing normal reading skills: Aspects of the visualprocesses underlying word recognition. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 76, 123–150.
Asaad, H. (2011).The effects of the visual characteristics of Arabic orthography on reading acquisition. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Haifa.
Azzam, R. (1984). Orthography and reading of the Arabic language. In J. Aaron & R. M. Joshi (Eds.), Reading and writing disorders in different orthographic systems (pp. 1–29). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.
Azzam, R. (1993). The nature of Arabic reading and spelling errors of young children. Reading and Writing, 5, 355–385.
Basharaheel, L. (2009). Gulf News, 9aba72l5air! Texting, Arab style.
Beeman, M. J., & Chiarello, C. (1998). Complementary right and left hemisphere language comprehension. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 7, 2–8.
Cattell, J. (1886). The time taken up by cerebral operations. Mind, 11, 277-282, 524–538.
Coulson, S., Federmeier, K., Van Petten, C., & Kutas, M. (2005). Right hemispheresensitivity to word and sentence level context: Evidence from event-relatedbrain potentials. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31, 129–147.
Eid, M. (1990). Arabic linguistics: The current scene. In M. Eid (Ed.), Perspectives on Arabic linguistics I (pp. 3–37). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Ellis, A. W., Ferreira, R., Cathles-Hagan, P., Holt, K., Jarvis, L., & Barca, L., (2009). Word learning and the cerebralhemispheres: from serial to parallelprocessing of written words. Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society B ,364, 3675–3696.
Eviatar, Z. (1999). Cross-language tests of hemispheric strategies in reading nonwords. Neuropsychology, 13(4), 498–515.
Eviatar, Z., & Ibrahim, R. (2000).Bilingual is as bilingual does: Metalinguistic abilities of Arabic-speaking children. Applied Psycholinguistics 21, 451–471.
Eviatar, Z., & Ibrahim, R. (2004). Morphological and orthographic effects on hemispheric processing of nonwords: A Cross-linguistic comparison. Reading and Writing, 17, 691–705.
Eviatar, Z., & Ibrahim, R. (2007). Morphological structure and hemispheric functioning: The contribution ofthe right hemisphere to reading in different languages. Neuropsychology, 21(4), 470–484.
Eviatar, Z., Ibrahim, R., & Ganayim, D. (2004). Orthography and the hemispheres: Visual and linguistic aspects of letter processing. Neuropsychology, 18(1), 174–184.
Eviatar, Z., & Zaidel, E. (1992). Letter matching in the hemispheres: Speed-accuracy tradeoffs. Neuropsychologia, 30, 699–710.
Eviatar, Z., & Zaidel, E. (1994). Letter matching in the disconnected hemispheres. Brain and Cognition, 25, 128–137.
Ferguson, C. A. (1959). Diglossia. Word, XV, 325-340; Reprinted in Dell Hymes (Ed.), Language in Culture and Society. New York, Evanston, London, 1964, 429–439
Fink, G. R., Halligan, P. W., Marshall, J. C., & Frith, C. D. (1997). Neural mechanisms involved in the processing of global and local aspects of hierarchically organized visual stimuli. Brain: A Journal of Neurology, 120(10), 1779–1791.
Ibrahim, R. (2006). Morpho-Phonemic similarity within and between languages: A factor to be considered in processing Arabic and Hebrew. Reading and Writing, 19(6), 563–586.
Ibrahim, R. (2009). Selective deficit of second language: A case of Arabic-Hebrew bilingual brain-damaged patient. Behavioral and Brain Functions, 5(17), 1–10.
Ibrahim, R., & Aharon-Peretz, J. (2005). Is literary Arabic a second language for native Arab speakers?: Evidence from a semantic priming study. The Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 34(1), 51–70.
Ibrahim, R., & Eviatar. Z. (2009). Language status and hemispheric involvement in reading: Evidence from trilingual Arabic speakers tested in Arabic, Hebrew, and English. Neuropsychology, 23(2), 240–254.
Ibrahim, R., & Eviatar, Z. (2012). The contribution of the two hemispheres to lexical decision in different languages. Behavioral and Brain Functions, 8(3).http://www.behavioralandbrainfunctions.com/content/8/1/3
Ibrahim, R., Eviatar, Z., & Aharon Peretz, J. (2002). The characteristics of the Arabic orthography slow its cognitive processing. Neuropsychology, 16(3), 322–326.
Ibrahim, R., Eviatar, Z., & Aharon Peretz, J. (2007). Metalinguistic awareness and reading performance:A cross language comparison. The Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 36(4), 297–317.
Ivry, R. B., & Robertson, L. C. (Eds.). (1998). The two sides of perception. New York: MIT Press.
Katz, L., & Frost, R. (1992). The reading process is different for different orthographies: The orthographic depth hypothesis. In L. Katz, R. Frost (Eds.), Orthography, phonology, morphology, and meaning, advances in psychology:Vol. 94 (pp. 67–84). Oxford: North-Holland.
Khateb, A., Michelb, C. M., Pegna, A. J., Thutc, G., Landis, T., & Annoni, J. M. (2001). The time course of semantic category processing in the cerebralhemispheres: An electrophysiological study. Cognitive Brain Research, 10, 251–264.
Kinsbourne, M. (1998). The right hemisphere and recovery from aphasia. In B. Stemmer & H. A. Whitaker (Eds.), Handbook of neurolinguistics (pp. 386-393). San Diego: Academic Press.
McCandliss, B. D., Cohen, L., & Dehaene, S. (2003).The visual word form area: Expertisefor reading in the fusiform gyrus. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 293–299.
Navon, D. (1977). Forest before trees: The precedence of global features in visual perception. Cognitive Psychology, 9, 353–383.
Peleg, O., & Eviatar, Z. (2008). Hemispheric sensitivities to lexical and contextual information: Evidence from lexical ambiguity resolution. Brain and Language, 105(2), 71–82.
Prunet, J. F., Be’land, R., & Idrissi, A. (2000). The mental representation of Semitic words. Linguistic Inquiry, 31, 609–648.
Rao, C., Vaid, J., Srinivasan, N., & Chen, H. (2011). Orthographic characteristics speed Hindi word naming but slow Urdu naming: Evidence from Hindi/Urdu biliterates. Reading and Writing, 24, 679–695.
Reitan, R. M. (1971). Trail making test results for normal and brain-damaged children. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 33, 575–581.
Robertson, L. C. (1995). Hemispheric specialization and cooperation in processing complex visual patterns;. In F. L. Kitterle (Ed.), Hemispheric communication: Mechanisms and models (pp. 310-318). Hillsdale: Erlbaum.
Saiegh-Haddad, E. (2003). Linguistic distance and initial reading acquisition: The case of Arabic diglossia. Applied Psycholinguistics, 24, 431–451.
Saiegh-Haddad, E. (2004). The impact of phonemic and lexical distance on the phonological analysis of word and pseudo-words in a diglossic context. Applied Psycholinguistics, 25, 495–512.
Saiegh-Haddad, E. (2005). Correlates of reading fluency in Arabic: Diglossic and orthographic factors. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 18, 559–582.
Saiegh-Haddad, E. (2007). Linguistic constraints on children’s ability to isolatephonemes in Arabic. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 605–625.
Saiegh-Haddad, E., Levin, I., Hende, N., & Ziv, M. (2011). The linguistic affiliation constraint and phoneme recognition in diglossic Arabic. Journal of Child Language, 38, 297–315.
Share, D. L., Jorm, A. F., Maclean, R., & Mathews, R. (1984). Sources of individual differences in reading achievement. Journal of Educational Psychology, 76, 1309–1324.
Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F. (1989). Exposure to print and orthographic processing. Reading Research Quarterly, 24, 402–433.
Taouk, M., & Coltheart, M. (2004). The cognitive processes involved in learning to read in Arabic. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 17, 27–57.
Van Kleeck, M. (1989). Hemispheric differences in global versus local processing of hierarchical visual stimuli by normal subjects: New data and a meta-analysis of previous studies. Neuropsychologia, 27(9), 1165–1178.
Vinckier, F., Dehaene, S., Jobert, A., Dubus, J. P., Sigman, M., & Cohen, L. (2007). Hierarchical coding of letter strings in the ventral stream: Dissecting the inner organizationof the visual word-form system. Neuron, 55, 143–156.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Eviatar, Z., Ibrahim, R. (2014). Why is it Hard to Read Arabic?. In: Saiegh-Haddad, E., Joshi, R. (eds) Handbook of Arabic Literacy. Literacy Studies, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8545-7_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8545-7_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-017-8544-0
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-8545-7
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawEducation (R0)