Neural correlates of diacritics in Arabic: An fMRI study

Bourisly, Ali K.; Haynes, Charles; Bourisly, Nibal; Mody, Maria

doi:10.1016/j.jneuroling.2012.07.004

Cited by 15 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…On average, participants had longer reaction times to words presented with (M=1542 msecs) than without diacritics (M=1369 msecs). These findings are consistent with previous research on the effects of diacritics on reading speed in Arabic and Hebrew (Abu-Liel, et al, 2014;Bourisly et al, 2013). It seems likely that reaction times were significantly longer because diacritics provide additional visual information to be processed by readers before semantic decisions could be made.…”

Section: Insert Figure 1 and 2 About Heresupporting

confidence: 91%

“…There is evidence that diacritics increase reading times. Bourisly, Haynes, Bourisly, and Mody (2013) found that diacritical markers slowed down lexical decisions about Arabic words regardless of how common the word was in the language (word frequency). Abu-Liel, Share, & Ibrahim (2014) and Ibrahim (2013) showed that the presence of diacritics slowed down naming of written words by skilled and by developing readers respectively.…”

Section: Effects Of Diacriticsmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…Even if it improved accuracy, therefore, the presence of diacritics is likely to increase response times for both ambiguous and unambiguous written words (e.g. Abu-Liel, et al, 2014;Bourisly et al, 2013).…”

Section: Effects Of Diacriticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Diacritics improve comprehension of the Arabic script by providing access to the meanings of heterophonic homographs

Maroun

Hanley

2016

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The diacritical markers that represent most of the vowels in the Arabic orthography are generally omitted from written texts. Previous research revealed that the absence of diacritics reduces reading comprehension performance even by skilled readers of Arabic. One possible explanation is that many Arabic words become ambiguous when diacritics are missing. Words of this kind are known as heterophonic homographs and are associated with at least two different pronunciations and meanings when written without diacritics. The aim of the two experiments reported in this study was to investigate whether the presence of diacritics improves the comprehension of all written words, or whether the effects are confined to heterophonic homographs. In Experiment 1, adult readers of Arabic were asked to decide whether written words had a living meaning. The materials included heterophonic homographs that had one living and one non-living meaning. Results showed that diacritics significantly increased the accuracy of semantic decisions about ambiguous words but had no effect on the accuracy of decisions about unambiguous words. Consistent results were observed in Experiment 2 where the materials comprised sentences rather than single words. Overall, the findings suggest that diacritics improve the comprehension of heterophonic homographs by facilitating access to semantic representations that would otherwise be difficult to access from print.

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Section: Insert Figure 1 and 2 About Heresupporting

confidence: 91%

Section: Effects Of Diacriticsmentioning

confidence: 96%

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Diacritics improve comprehension of the Arabic script by providing access to the meanings of heterophonic homographs

Maroun

Hanley

2016

Read Writ

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“…Interestingly, the N400 effect has been documented in many languages including Dutch (e.g., Brown and Hagoort, 1993;Gunter et al, 1997), English (e.g., Kutas and Hillyard, 1980;Boddy, 1981;Bentin et al, 1985), Finnish (e.g., Juottonen, Revonsuo and Lang, 1996), French (e.g., Besson and Macar, 1987;Khateb et al, 2003, and2010), German (e.g., Heinze, Münte and Mangun, 1994;Günter et al, 1997), Italian (Cobianchi and Giaquinto, 1997), Japanese (Ueno and Kluender, 2009), Mandarin Chinese (e.g., Lee, Tsai, Huang, Hung and Tzeng, 2006;Ye, Luo, Friederici and Zhou, 2006), Norwegian (e.g, von Koss Torkildsen, Syversen, Gram Simonsen, Moen and Lindgren, 2007), Spanish (Wicha et al, 2003), Swedish (e.g., Ors, Lindgren, Berglund, Hägglund, Rosen and Blennow, 2001) but, to our knowledge, it has never been tested in Arabic (Bourisly et al, 2013) using the fMRI method and Taha et al (2012) mainly examined the N170 component.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…Results of experiments using neuro-imaging suggest that shallow and deep orthographies involve different neural substrates (Bourisly et al, 2013;Paulesu et al, 2000). Orthographic depth also has measurable effects on at least two components of the Event Related Potentials (ERPs): the N170 and the N320 component (Bentin et al, 1999;Proverbio and Zani, 2003) that are of most interest here.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%