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

Manuel Perea,Manuel Carreiras,Ahmed Mohammed,Batoul Khalifa,Reem Abu Mallouh

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01255

Abstract

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.

Highlights

As reviewed by Grainger et al (2016), models of visual word recognition in the Roman alphabet assume that the visual form of the word’s component letters is quickly mapped onto abstract units irrespective of font, case, position, or size
We examined whether visual-letter similarity plays a role at the early stages of word processing in another commonly-used script: Arabic
Response times (RTs) shorter than 250 ms were removed from the correct RT analyses

Summary

Introduction

As reviewed by Grainger et al (2016), models of visual word recognition in the Roman alphabet assume that the visual form of the word’s component letters is quickly mapped onto abstract units irrespective of font, case, position, or size. These abstract letter units are the driving force behind the process of visual word recognition. This analysis is consistent with the available empirical evidence. Recent research has shown that visual similarity plays some role for briefly presented primes containing letter-like digits or symbols (e.g., M4TERI4L-MATERIAL faster than M6TERI6L-MATERIAL; see Perea et al, 2008), but these effects do not seem to occur for substituted-letter primes (e.g., the visually-similar prime HRHNDON does not facilitate the processing of the target abandon more than the control prime DWDNDON; see Kinoshita et al, 2013)

Methods

Results

Conclusion