The effect of dots on Arabic visual word recognition: a psycholinguistic perspective | ||||
| The Egyptian Journal of Language Engineering | ||||
| Article 3, Volume 11, Issue 2, October 2024, Page 46-62 PDF (1.35 MB) | ||||
| Document Type: Original Article | ||||
| DOI: 10.21608/ejle.2024.386284 | ||||
 View on SCiNiTO | ||||
| Author | ||||
Noha Mohamed 
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| Smouha, Alexandria, Egypt | ||||
| Abstract | ||||
| The Arabic orthographic system is a rich system, owing to several properties of which is the use of dots to differentiate the various graphemes and thus recognize the different words. However, native speakers of Arabic cannot only read undotted words using context, but they can also read single undotted words. The current study examines the cognitive processes underlying the identification of single undotted words, that can be used to provide a cognitive basis for automatic identification of undotted words. Two experiments are designed, the first experiment is a masked priming lexical decision task. In which participants are presented with two words: a prime, an undotted word and a target, a dotted word. The relation between the prime and the target is manipulated. Participants are asked to respond whether the target is a word or not using two keyboard buttons, response time is recorded in milliseconds accuracy. The second experiment is a lexical decision task, in which two factors are conflicted, the number of dots and the word frequency. The results of experiment 1 showed that undotted primes can facilitate a dotted counterpart, only when the undotted primes are meaningless such as سرٮ. The results of experiment 2 showed a significant effect of word frequency and a facilitation for words with more dots that disagrees with the general principal that visual complexities induce a perceptual load. The several cognitive factors that contribute to single undotted words identification are discussed. | ||||
| Keywords | ||||
| Undotted words; Arabic; Visual complexity; priming; word frequency | ||||
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