Morphology and Spelling in Arabic: Development and Interface

Abstract

In the current study, two experiments were carried out: the first tested the development of derivational root and word-pattern morphological awareness in Arabic; the second tested morphological processing in Arabic spelling. 143 Arabic native speaking children with normal reading skills in 2nd, 4th and 6th grade participated in the study. The results of the first experiment demonstrated the early emergence of derivational morphological awareness in children, with root awareness emerging earlier than word-pattern awareness. The second experiment supported the implication of morphological processing in spelling words and pseudo words across all grades tested. The results are discussed within a developmental psycholinguistic framework with particular emphasis on the characteristics of the Arabic language and orthography.

Development and Relationships Between Phonological Awareness, Morphological Awareness and Word Reading in Spoken and Standard Arabic

“…Results of this study indicate that in addition to the expected role of SpA PA, SpA morphological awareness plays a cardinal role in StA word reading fluency. This finding is well aligned with the established claim that morphological awareness contributes to school-age students’ performance reading and spelling words or pseudowords (Abu-Rabia et al, 2003; Abu-Rabia, 2007; Saiegh-Haddad, 2013; Taha and Saiegh-Haddad, 2016, 2017). Similar findings have been reported in English (e.g., Deacon and Kirby, 2004; Carlisle and Stone, 2005; Nunes et al, 2006), French (e.g., Casalis and Louis-Alexandre, 2000), Dutch (e.g., Assink et al, 2000), Chinese (e.g., Ku and Anderson, 2003; Chung and Hu, 2007), and Hebrew (Schiff and Lotem, 2011) – to name a few.…”

“…Further, in light of previous studies reporting either a direct (Deacon et al, 2014) or indirect (Kieffer and Box, 2013) impact that morphological awareness has on reading comprehension, it would be beneficial to wrap morphological awareness into the Arabic language arts curriculum as preventative treatment that would compensate for the deficits caused by diglossia. A next step, which would have both theoretical and applied values, would be to carry out intervention studies to test further the causal hypothesis and promote the use of developmental research in teaching (Taha and Saiegh-Haddad, 2016, 2017). …”

“…Moreover, typological differences between languages and orthographies are often noticeable in the morphological structure with some orthographies, like English, being scarce morphologically (often not depicting word-internal morphological structure), as against other orthographies like Arabic and Hebrew (Semitic languages) which are very rich morphologically and where the majority of words encode an internal morphological structure. Because writing systems are isomorphic (Verhoeven and Perfetti, 2003), that is they represent the morphological structure though to different degrees of explicitness, these differences in morphological richness are often also reflected in the orthographic structure of words in different languages and this, in turn, has repercussions for morphological awareness development and processing in reading and spelling in different languages (e.g., Bryant et al, 1999; Assink et al, 2000; Ravid and Bar-On, 2005; Gillis and Ravid, 2006; Saiegh-Haddad and Geva, 2008; Saiegh-Haddad, 2013; Taha and Saiegh-Haddad, 2016, 2017; Saiegh-Haddad and Taha, 2017). For example, In the Arabic writing system, the morphemic units in words are not concatenated as is the case in English or French.…”

“…In fact, the root and the word-pattern appear to be central to the way that words are organized in the Arabic lexicon (Boudelaa, 2014). It also appears to be implicated in early reading and spelling in Arabic (Saiegh-Haddad, 2013; Taha and Saiegh-Haddad, 2016, 2017), to be impaired in reading disabled readers (Abu-Rabia et al, 2003; Saiegh-Haddad and Taha, 2017), and to be used as a compensatory mechanism among reading disabled to aid their phonological deficits (Saiegh-Haddad and Taha, 2017). …”

“…Given the morphological richness of Arabic (Saiegh-Haddad and Henkin-Roitfarb, 2014) and the proliferation of morphology in the linguistic and orthographic representation of the word and, in turn, in word reading and spelling in Arabic (Abu-Rabia et al, 2003; Abu-Rabia, 2007; Saiegh-Haddad, 2013, 2017; Taha and Saiegh-Haddad, 2016, 2017; Saiegh-Haddad and Taha, 2017; Tibi and Kirby, 2017), the study of morphological processing in Arabic is highly warranted. Moreover, because there are differences between SpA and StA in inflectional morphology, with some StA inflectional categories not encoded in SpA, such as dual and plural feminine verbal forms, and in derivational morphology, with some StA word-patterns not used in SpA (Saiegh-Haddad and Henkin-Roitfarb, 2014), it is critical to study the role of morphological awareness in reading Arabic, as well as the relevance of SpA morphology in particular to reading in StA (Roman et al, 2009; Wolter et al, 2009).…”