Does the Visual Attention Span Play a Role in Reading in Arabic?

It is unclear whether the association between the visual attention (VA) span and reading differs across languages. Here we studied this relationship in Arabic, where the use of specific reading strategies depends on the amount of diacritics on words: reading vowelized and nonvowelized Arabic scripts favor sublexical and lexical strategies, respectively. We hypothesized that the size of the VA span and its association to reading would differ depending on individual �script preferences.� We compared children who were more proficient in reading fully vowelized Arabic than nonvowelized Arabic (VOW) to children for whom the opposite was true (NOVOW). NOVOW children showed a crowding effect in th…