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

Abstract

Diacritics convey vowel sounds in Arabic, allowing accurate word pronunciation.Mostly, modern Arabic is printed non-diacritised. 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 were embedded in temporarily ambiguous sentences where 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., ‫بيد‬ /b i j a d/, 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 diacritised 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.Keywords: diacritics, reading Arabic, eye movements, garden path, parsing preferenceReading in a number of the world's languages has been studied using the methodology of tracking readers' eye movements (see e.g. Rayner, 1998;2009 the role of vowel phonology in Arabic in the computation of syntactic structure, and the construction of semantic representations). In addition, these unique properties allow us to pose novel questions concerning written language processing in general.Eye tracking is a non-intrusive way of studying the cognitive processes associated with reading since readers' eye movements are tightly linked with these processes (e.g., Liversedge & Findlay, 2000;Rayner, 1998;2009). The research reported here used eye-tracking methodology to explore readers'processing of Arabic vowel phonology, and whether, and how, this phonological processing interacts with syntactic processing.Arabic is an alphabetic language, which, like Hebrew, is written and read from right to left. Also like Hebrew, letters mainly denote consonant sounds, whereas short vowels are denoted by diacritical marks (diacritics hereafter, see Abu-Rabia, 2002;Haywood & Nahmad, 1965; Schulz, 2004), which are added to the written letters.This vowel information has the potential to disambiguate the pronunciation of words 1984; Bentin & Frost, 1987; Koriat, 1984); and offline measures in text reading tasks (e.g. reading speed and accuracy, or comprehension measures, e.g. Abu-Rabia, 1997a;1997b;. Some studies have suggested that the presence of diacritics contributes to improved reading accuracy and comprehension. Abu-Rabia (1997a), for instance, presented readers with single words, sentences and paragraphs, which were diacritised, or non-diacritised. The readers were 10th grade (about 16 years ...

Parafoveal processing of Arabic diacritical marks.

“…However, our surveys clearly indicated that in printed modern Arabic text diacritics are mostly added to the homograph to point the reader towards one of its subordinate pronunciations in a non-constraining context (Hermena et al, 2015 subordinate diacritization pattern that would appear on the string ‫قدر‬ /qdr/ in a sentence (e.g., the noun version meaning vessel, or the verb version estimated/destined), will be the one which best fits the syntactic structure and context of the sentence. Indeed, constructing a comprehensible Arabic sentence where structure and context do not constrain the reader towards a smaller number of possible alternative pronunciations to choose from would be nearly impossible.…”

“…Surveying ambiguous homographic words in Arabic and the use of diacritics in print, Hermena et al (2015) indicated that the vast majority of Arabic ambiguous homographic words are biased homographs (see e.g., Rayner & Duffy, 1986;Sereno, O'Donnell, & Rayner, 2006). Essentially, the multiple pronunciations of the Arabic homographs are not equally commonly encountered, or produced, by readers.…”

“…In the example ‫قدر‬ /qdr/, the sentence structure would ordinarily rule out either the verb, or noun interpretations. Thus the ambiguity of the homograph is reduced somewhat given that the number of plausible representations becomes limited (e.g., the three noun pronunciations, with /q a d a r un / being the dominant; or the two verb versions, with the active voice pronunciation being the dominant, see Hermena et al, 2015;Schulz, 2004).…”

“…Rather, readers become skilled in using the text's context and syntactic structure to disambiguate homographs (Abu-Rabia, 1997a;1997b;1998). The exception is that diacritics are added to some individual ambiguous words in the text, if the surrounding text does not adequately disambiguate them (see Hermena, Drieghe, Hellmuth, & Liversedge, 2015;Schulz, 2004).…”

“…As mentioned above, diacritics are added to some individual ambiguous words in printed text, in principle, only if the surrounding text does not adequately disambiguate them, regardless of whether the dominant or subordinate pronunciations are instantiated by the text (see Hermena et al, 2015;also Schulz, 2004). However, our surveys clearly indicated that in printed modern Arabic text diacritics are mostly added to the homograph to point the reader towards one of its subordinate pronunciations in a non-constraining context (Hermena et al, 2015 subordinate diacritization pattern that would appear on the string ‫قدر‬ /qdr/ in a sentence (e.g., the noun version meaning vessel, or the verb version estimated/destined), will be the one which best fits the syntactic structure and context of the sentence.…”