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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Do Diacritical Marks Play a Role at the Early Stages of Word Recognition in Arabic?

Manuel PereaManuel PereaReem Abu MallouhAhmed MohammedBatoul KhalifaManuel Carreiras

subject

lexical accesslcsh:BF1-990Word processing050105 experimental psychologyIdentity (music)PSYCHOLOGY03 medical and health sciencesPrime (symbol)0302 clinical medicinemasked primingFeature (machine learning)Lexical decision task0501 psychology and cognitive sciencesGeneral PsychologyOriginal Researchlexical decisionVisual-word recognition05 social sciencesLinguisticslcsh:PsychologyWord recognitionvisual-letter similarityPsychologyPriming (psychology)030217 neurology & neurosurgeryWord (group theory)

description

Published: 22 August 2016 A crucial question in the domain of visual word recognition is whether letter similarity plays a role in the early stages of visual word processing. Here we focused on Arabic because in this language there are various groups of letters that share the same basic shape and only differ in the number/location of diacritical points. We conducted a masked priming lexical decision experiment in which a target word was preceded by: (i) an identity prime; (ii) a prime in which the critical letter was replaced by a letter with the same shape that differed in the number of diacritics (e.g., ); or (iii) a prime in which the critical letter was replaced by a letter with different shape (e.g., ). Results showed a sizable advantage of the identity condition over the two substituted-letter priming conditions (i.e., diacritical information is rapidly processed). Thus, diacritical marks play an essential role in the “feature letter” level of models of visual word recognition in Arabic. The research reported in this article has been supported by Grant NPRP No. 6-378-5–035 from Qatar Foundation.

yearjournalcountryeditionlanguage
2016-08-22
10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01255http://hdl.handle.net/10810/19583