Abstract
The current study investigated the influence of morphological structure on the earliest stages of Arabic reading acquisition. More specifically, we aimed at examining the role of root and pattern units in beginners from Grade 1 to 3. A first set of reading tasks evaluated the presence of a morphology facilitation effect in word and pseudoword reading by manipulating independently the frequency of roots and patterns. Additional tasks aimed at examining the contribution of morphological awareness to reading performance. The results suggest that reading ability is early influenced by the awareness of morphological composition. Children read faster and more accurately pseudowords composed of frequent morphemes. Furthermore, regression analyses revealed, for every reading measure, a significant contribution of one morphological test in addition to grapheme knowledge. Results are discussed taking into account the differences obtained depending on lexicality and morpheme type (root or pattern).
Highlights
Reading acquisition entails the establishment of connections between orthography, phonology and meaning
Most models have assumed that the major component of early stages of reading acquisition consists in the development of a phonological recoding system based on grapheme–phoneme correspondences (GPCs) (Frith, 1985; Ehri and McCormick, 1998; Seymour et al, 2003; Sprenger-Charolles et al, 2003; Ehri, 2005; Ziegler and Goswami, 2005)
The results showed a similar contribution of morpho-phonological induction to word comprehension, in which no morphological constraints affected the selection of materials, confirming the conclusion that the association between reading performance and morphological awareness (MA) cannot be explained by the characteristics of the items in the oral reading tasks
Summary
Reading acquisition entails the establishment of connections between orthography, phonology and meaning. Studies on different languages prove essential to ensure the generality of theories (Share, 2008), and a universal model of reading and reading acquisition would require a detailed account of how the orthographic and linguistic features of different languages determine the mechanisms of word recognition and their learning (Frost, 2006, 2012). In this perspective, the Arabic language and writing system constitutes an interesting case to explore. As the script is cursive, graphemes are ligated, and they may receive different graphic
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