Saudi Cultural Missions Theses & Dissertations
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Item Restricted ORTHOGRAPHIC EFFECTS IN L2 ARABIC WORD PROCESSING: A PRIMING STUDY(University of Maryland, College Park, 2025) Aljohani, Raneem; Jiang, NanLate Arabic learners seem to process words in a similar manner to native speakers, distinguishing their processing pattern from the commonly held assumption that form-relatedness drives lexical access in L2 learners. The morphologically driven facilitation witnessed in L2 Arabic learners inspired the current study to further investigate if orthographic effects can be obtained within the same population. Therefore, the current study investigated if late Arabic learners process orthographically related prime-target pairs in a similar manner to native speakers. The study measured participants' reaction times during a lexical decision task while being primed by orthographic neighbors ( شاب – باب ) and orthographic embedded words ( أسباب - باب ). The results contradicted the prediction and challenge the notion that L2 learners are generally primed by form similarities. L2 Arabic learners seem to differ from L2 speakers of concatenative languages. The results also confirmed previous claims suggesting a lack of orthographic priming effects in L2 Arabic learners, indicating that their processing could be morphologically driven.10 0Item Restricted Arabic Diacritics And Reading: A Proposed Psycholinguistic Approch To Foreign/Second-Language Pedagogy(Saudi Digital Library, 2023) Alqazlan, Bandar; Morkus, NaderArabic orthography is mainly presented either in shallow orthography (with all diacritics) for novice students or in deep orthography (without diacritics) for superior readers. However, the shallow orthography is heavily loaded with diacritics which may burden the reading process, whereas deep orthography can cause ambiguity (heterophonic homographic words). Building upon the findings of current psycholinguistic research, this study introduces a systematic approach to effectively and economically address the issue of diacritics and reading. This proposed approach begins with shallow orthography for new words the first six to twelve times they are encountered to assure lexical internalization and then ends with the newly-coined term semi-deep orthography in which only the needed diacritics are used. The semi-deep orthography is employed based on two principles: word frequency and ambiguity within the root-pattern system. The first principle is word frequency, in which the top 5000 high-frequency words, accounting for approximately 90% of written discourse, do not need diacritics. The second principle is ambiguity within the root-pattern system, since this system produces nearly 85% of Arabic vocabulary and thus provides the basic unwritten-vowel framework required for reading. However, occasionally ambiguity emerges within the system, for example when diacritics are required to distinguish between the active and passive forms of a verb.34 0