Does the Visual Attention Span Play a Role in Reading in Arabic?
Date
2018Author
Lallier, Marie
Abu Mallouh, Reem
Mohammed, Ahmed M.
Khalifa, Batoul
Perea, Manuel
Carreiras, Manuel
Metadata
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Marie Lallier, Reem Abu Mallouh, Ahmed M. Mohammed, Batoul Khalifa, Manuel Perea & Manuel Carreiras (2018) Does the Visual Attention Span Play a Role in Reading in Arabic?, Scientific Studies of Reading, 22:2, 181-190, DOI: 10.1080/10888438.2017.1421958
Abstract
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 the VA span task, whereas VOW children did not. Moreover, the crowding in the VA span task correlated with the reading performance in the NOVOW group only. These results are discussed in light of individual differences on the use of reading strategies in Arabic.