Abstract
This study investigated the effect of Arabic vowels and Arabic context on reading accuracy of poor and skilled native Arabic readers reading narrative stories and newspaper articles. 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 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 109 tenth-grade native Arabic speakers, 39 of them poor readers and 70 skilled readers. Subjects had to read Arabic narrative stories and newspaper articles. There were four reading conditions for each text type: vowelized text, unvowelized text, vowelized word naming, and unvowelized word naming. The results showed that vowels and contexts were important variables to facilitate word recognition in poor and skilled readers in Arabic orthography. A new Arabic reading model for skilled readers is suggested.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abu-Rabia, S. & Siegel, L.S. (1995). Different orthographies, different context effects: The effects of Arabic sentence context on skilled and poor readers, Reading Psychology 16: 1–19.
Adams, M.J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Cambridge, MA: The 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.
Bentin, S. & Frost, R. (1987). Processing lexical ambiguity and visual word recognition in a deep orthography, Memory & Cognition 25: 13–23.
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.
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.
Heywood, J.A. & Nahmad, H.M. (1965). The Arabic language: A new Arabic grammar of the written language. London: Percy Lund, Humphries & Co.
Jobran, K. (1964). The writings of Jobran. Beirut: Dar-Alnasher.
Just, M.A. & Carpenter, P.A. (1980). Atheory of reading: Fromeye-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 (pp. 227–242). 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 & 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 (pp. 91–102). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Perfetti, C.A. (1985). Reading ability. New York: Oxford University Press.
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 of 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.
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. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequence 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. Reading and Writing 9, 65–78 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007962408827
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007962408827