Raphiq Ibrahim

Bilingual Is as Bilingual Does: Metalinguistic Abilities of Arabic-Speaking Children.

ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCEZohar Eviatar, Institute of Information Processing and Decision Making, University of Haifa,Mount Carmel, Haifa, Israel 31905. Email: zohare@psy.haifa.ac.ilABSTRACTThe study explores the effects of the relationship between exposure to two languages in childhoodand metalinguistic abilities. Arabic-speaking children who had been exposed to both spoken andliterary Arabic were compared to Russian–Hebrew bilinguals and Hebrew monolinguals. All of thechildren were in kindergarten or first grade. The tests included language arbitrariness, phonologicalawareness, and vocabulary. As compared to the Hebrew monolinguals, the Russian–Hebrew bilin-guals revealed the following pattern: higher performance on arbitrariness and phonological aware-ness tasks and lower performance on the vocabulary measure. The results of the Arab childrenmimicked those of the Russian–Hebrew bilinguals and differed from those of the Hebrew monolin-guals. We conclude that exposure to literary Arabic requires the same intensive language analysesas those demanded of children exposed to languages as different as Russian and Hebrew.

The characteristics of arabic orthography slow its processing.

The present study was designed to evaluate whether the complexity of Arabic orthography increases its perceptual load, thus slowing word identification. Adolescent Arabic speakers who mastered Hebrew as a second language completed oral and visual versions of the Trail Making Test (TMT; J. E. Parington & R. G. Lieter, 1949) in both languages. Oral TMT required declaiming consecutive numbers or alternation between numbers and letters. Visual TMT required connecting Arabic or Indian numbers and alternation between letters and numbers. Performance in Hebrew and Arabic oral TMT did not differ. Performance was significantly slower in Arabic visual TMT. These results indicate that Arabic speakers process Arabic orthography (1st language) slower than Hebrew orthography (2nd language) and suggest that this is due to the complexity of Arabic orthography.

Orthography and the hemispheres: visual and linguistic aspects of letter processing.

Hebrew and Arabic are Semitic languages with a similar morphological structure and orthographies that differ in visual complexity. Two experiments explored the interaction of the characteristics of orthography and hemispheric abilities on lateralized versions of a letter-matching task (Experiment 1) and a global-local task (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, native Hebrew readers and native Arabic readers fluent in Hebrew matched letters in the 2 orthographies. The results support the hypothesis that Arabic orthography is more difficult than Hebrew orthography for participants who can read both languages and that this difficulty has its strongest effects in the left visual field. In Experiment 2, native Arabic speakers performed a global-local letter detection task with Arabic letters with 2 types of inconsistent stimuli: different and similar. The results support the hypothesis that the right hemisphere of skilled Arabic readers cannot distinguish between similar Arabic letters, whereas the left hemisphere can.

Perceptual load in the reading of Arabic: Effects of orthographic visual complexity on detection

Previous research has suggested that reading Arabic is slower than reading Hebrew or English, even among native Arabic readers. We tested the hypothesis that at least part of the difficulty in reading Arabic is due to the visual complexity of Arabic orthography. Third- and sixth-grade native readers of Arabic who were studying Hebrew in school were asked to detect a vowel diacritic in the context of Hebrew words and nonwords, Arabic words and nonwords (including connected and unconnected Arabic letters), and nonletter stimuli that resembled Arabic or Hebrew letters. Participants were better at detecting target vowels in Hebrew than in any of the Arabic conditions. Moreover, target detection in Arabic was better for letter strings containing connected letters than for those containing unconnected letters. The findings extend previous results on Hebrew versus Arabic reading and support a perceptual load account of the source of processing difficulty in reading Arabic. Performance in the Arabic conditions did not reveal a word superiority effect, suggesting that even by sixth grade, reading is not automatized to the point where it can compensate for the the visual complexity of the orthography.

How Does Arabic Orthographic Connectivity Modulate Brain Activity During Visual Word Recognition: An ERP Study

One of the unique features of the Arabic orthography that differentiates it from many other alphabetical ones is the fact that most letters connect obligatorily to each other. Hence, these letters change their forms according to the location in the word (i.e. beginning, middle, or end), leading to the suggestion that connectivity adds a visual load which negatively impacts reading in Arabic. In this study, we investigated the effects of the orthographic connectivity on the time course of early brain electric responses during the visual word recognition. For this purpose, we collected event-related potentials (ERPs) from adult skilled readers while performing a lexical decision task using fully connected (Cw), partially connected and non-connected words (NCw). Reaction times variance was higher and accuracy was lower in NCw compared to Cw words. ERPs analysis revealed significant amplitude and latency differences between Cw and NCw at posterior electrodes during the N170 component which implied the temporo-occipital areas. Our findings show that instead of slowing down reading, orthographic connectivity in Arabic skilled readers seems to impact positively the reading process already during the early stages of word recognition. These results are discussed in relation to previous observations in the literature.

Language status and hemispheric involvement in reading: evidence from trilingual Arabic speakers tested in Arabic, Hebrew, and English.

This study explores the effects of language status on hemispheric involvement in lexical decision. The authors looked at the responses of native Arabic speakers in Arabic (L1 for reading) and in two second languages (L2): Hebrew, which is similar to L1 in morphological structure, and English, which is very different from L1. Two groups of Arabic speakers performed lateralized lexical decision tasks in the three languages, using unilateral presentations and bilateral presentations. These paradigms allowed us to infer both hemispheric specialization and interhemispheric communication in the three languages, and the effects of language status (native vs. nonnative) and similarity on hemispheric patterns of responses. In general the authors show an effect of language status in the right visual field (RVF), reflecting the greater facility of the left hemisphere (LH) in recognizing words in the participants native Arabic than in their other languages. The participants revealed similar patterns of interhemispheric integration across the languages, with more integration occurring for words than for nonwords. Both hemispheres revealed sensitivity to morphological complexity, a pattern similar to that of native Hebrew readers and different from that of native English readers.

The cognitive basis of diglossia in Arabic: Evidence from a repetition priming study within and between languages.

This study examined diglossia and its cognitive basis in Arabic. Repetition priming effects were compared within spoken Arabic (SA), as well as with the effects found when the primes were in either literary Arabic (LA) or Hebrew. In experiment 1, using lexical decisions for auditory presented words, a significant priming effect was found at lag 0 when the primes were in LA and in Hebrew. Furthermore, large repetition priming effects were found at relatively long lags (lag 8–12) within SA. This effect was absent when the repetition involved translation equivalents using either Hebrew or LA. The results showing that lexical decisions for words in SA were not influenced by previous presentations of translation equivalents in LA, in addition to the findings from a former study on semantic priming effects, suggest that the status of LA is similar to that of Hebrew and is consistent with the typical organization of L2 in a separate lexicon. Thus, learning LA appears to be, in some respects, more like learning a second language than like learning the formal register of one’s native language.

The contribution of the two hemispheres to lexical decision in different languages

BackgroundBoth reading words and text in Arabic is slower than in other languages, even among skilled native Arabic speakers Previously we have shown that the right hemisphere (RH) had difficulty in matching Arabic letters, and suggested that it cannot contribute to word recognition in Arabic. In this study we tested this finding directly.MethodWe used the Divided Visual Field (DVF) lexical decision (LD) paradigm to assess hemispheric function during reading. The experiment had two conditions (unilateral and bilateral). In the unilateral condition, the target stimulus was presented unilaterally to the left or the right visual field. In the bilateral condition two stimuli were presented simultaneously, and participants were cued as to which one was the target. Three groups of participants were tested: Arabic speakers, Hebrew speakers, and English speakers. Each group was tested in their native language.ResultsFor Hebrew and English speakers, performance in both visual fields was significantly better in the unilateral than in the bilateral condition. For Arabic speakers, performance in the right visual field (RVF, where stimuli are presented directly to the left hemisphere) did not change in the two conditions. Performance in the LVF (when stimuli are presented directly to the right hemisphere) was at chance level in the bilateral condition, but not in the unilateral condition.ConclusionWe interpret these data as supporting the hypothesis that in English and Hebrew, both hemispheres are involved in LD, whereas in Arabic, the right hemisphere is not involved in word recognition.

Listening with an Accent: Speech Perception in a Second Language by Late Bilinguals

The goal of the present study was to examine functioning of late bilinguals in their second language. Specifically, we asked how native and non-native Hebrew speaking listeners perceive accented and native-accented Hebrew speech. To achieve this goal we used the gating paradigm to explore the ability of healthy late fluent bilinguals (Russian and Arabic native speakers) to recognize words in L2 (Hebrew) when they were spoken in an accent like their own, a native accent (Hebrew speakers), or another foreign accent (American accent). The data revealed that for Hebrew speakers, there was no effect of accent, whereas for the two bilingual groups (Russian and Arabic native speakers), stimuli with an accent like their own and the native Hebrew accent, required significantly less phonological information than the other foreign accents. The results support the hypothesis that phonological assimilation works in a similar manner in these two different groups.

Morphological Structure and Hemispheric Functioning: The Contribution of the Right Hemisphere to Reading in Different Languages

This study examined the relationship between morphological structure of languages and performance asymmetries of native speakers in lateralized tasks. In 2 experiments, native speakers of English (concatenative morphology stem plus affix) and of Hebrew and Arabic (nonconcatenative root plus word-form morphology) were presented with lateralized lexical decision tasks, in which the morphological structure of both words and nonwords was manipulated. In the 1st study, stimuli were presented unilaterally. In the 2nd study, 2 stimuli were presented bilaterally, and participants were cued to respond to 1 of them. Three different indexes of hemispheric integration were tested: processing dissociation, effects of distractor status, and the bilateral effect. Lateralization patterns in the 3 languages revealed both common and language-specific patterns. For English speakers, only the left hemisphere (LH) was sensitive to morphological structure, consistent with the hypothesis that the LH processes right visual field stimuli independently but that the right hemisphere uses LH abilities to process words in the left visual field. In Hebrew and Arabic, both hemispheres are sensitive to morphological structure, and interhemispheric transfer of information may be more symmetrical than in English. The relationship between universal and experience-specific effects on brain organization is discussed.