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Processing of Arabic diacritical marks: phonological–syntactic disambiguation of homographic verbs and visual crowding effects

Processing of Arabic diacritical marks: phonological–syntactic disambiguation of homographic verbs and visual crowding effects
Processing of Arabic diacritical marks: phonological–syntactic disambiguation of homographic verbs and visual crowding effects
Diacritics convey vowel sounds in Arabic, allowing accurate word pronunciation. Mostly, modern Arabic is printed nondiacritized. Otherwise, diacritics appear either only on homographic words when not disambiguated by surrounding text or on all words as in religious or educational texts. In an eye-tracking experiment, we examined sentence processing in the absence of diacritics and when diacritics were presented in either modes. Heterophonic homographic target verbs that have different pronunciations in active and passive (e.g., ? /daraba/, hit; ? /doriba/, was hit) were embedded in temporarily ambiguous sentences in which in the absence of diacritics, readers cannot be certain whether the verb was active or passive. Passive sentences were disambiguated by an extra word (e.g., ? /bijad/, by the hand of). Our results show that readers benefitted from the disambiguating diacritics when present only on the homographic verb. When disambiguating diacritics were absent, Arabic readers followed their parsing preference for active verb analysis, and garden path effects were observed. When reading fully diacritized sentences, readers incurred only a small cost, likely due to increased visual crowding, but did not extensively process the (mostly superfluous) diacritics, thus resulting in a lack of benefit from the disambiguating diacritics on the passive verb.
0096-1523
494-507
Hermena, Ehab W.
94c85f82-abd2-4c52-a96f-59e1e73552f6
Drieghe, Denis
dfe41922-1cea-47f4-904b-26d5c9fe85ce
Hellmuth, Sam
d5d45278-4c3a-4ad3-9273-a7228e394832
Liversedge, Simon.P.
3ebda3f3-d930-4f89-85d5-5654d8fe7dee
Hermena, Ehab W.
94c85f82-abd2-4c52-a96f-59e1e73552f6
Drieghe, Denis
dfe41922-1cea-47f4-904b-26d5c9fe85ce
Hellmuth, Sam
d5d45278-4c3a-4ad3-9273-a7228e394832
Liversedge, Simon.P.
3ebda3f3-d930-4f89-85d5-5654d8fe7dee

Hermena, Ehab W., Drieghe, Denis, Hellmuth, Sam and Liversedge, Simon.P. (2015) Processing of Arabic diacritical marks: phonological–syntactic disambiguation of homographic verbs and visual crowding effects. Journal of Experimental Psychology Human Perception & Performance, 41 (2), 494-507. (doi:10.1037/xhp0000032).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Diacritics convey vowel sounds in Arabic, allowing accurate word pronunciation. Mostly, modern Arabic is printed nondiacritized. Otherwise, diacritics appear either only on homographic words when not disambiguated by surrounding text or on all words as in religious or educational texts. In an eye-tracking experiment, we examined sentence processing in the absence of diacritics and when diacritics were presented in either modes. Heterophonic homographic target verbs that have different pronunciations in active and passive (e.g., ? /daraba/, hit; ? /doriba/, was hit) were embedded in temporarily ambiguous sentences in which in the absence of diacritics, readers cannot be certain whether the verb was active or passive. Passive sentences were disambiguated by an extra word (e.g., ? /bijad/, by the hand of). Our results show that readers benefitted from the disambiguating diacritics when present only on the homographic verb. When disambiguating diacritics were absent, Arabic readers followed their parsing preference for active verb analysis, and garden path effects were observed. When reading fully diacritized sentences, readers incurred only a small cost, likely due to increased visual crowding, but did not extensively process the (mostly superfluous) diacritics, thus resulting in a lack of benefit from the disambiguating diacritics on the passive verb.

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e-pub ahead of print date: 23 February 2015
Published date: April 2015

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 376536
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/376536
ISSN: 0096-1523
PURE UUID: b58b6767-1e31-4f85-b5ae-72e998ffd37f
ORCID for Denis Drieghe: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0001-9630-8410

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Date deposited: 05 May 2015 13:31
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 03:34

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Contributors

Author: Ehab W. Hermena
Author: Denis Drieghe ORCID iD
Author: Sam Hellmuth
Author: Simon.P. Liversedge

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