Saudi Cultural Missions Theses & Dissertations
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Item Restricted The Multimodal Composition of Irony in Arabic Subtitled Film Texts: An Audience Reception Study(Saudi Digital Library, 2025) Almousa, Ayat; Ramos Pinto, Sara; Sharoff, Serge; Elgindy, AhmedThis reception study examines the impact of different subtitling practices—conventional as opposed to free-form—on the audience’s reception of irony and perceptions of the subtitles used. It addresses some limitations in audiovisual translation studies. First, most studies carried out on irony have considered the European context and very few have examined the English-to-Arabic subtitling of irony. Second, among the small number of audiovisual translation studies on irony, very few have experimentally examined the reception of irony by a target audience. Third, most audiovisual translation studies have not considered the non-verbal meaning-making resources as an integral component in films but rather have limited their offerings to a contextual role or hindrances to the translation process. Fourth, despite the growing research on free-form subtitling, this practice has never been explored in the Saudi Arabian context. Therefore, this study proposes an original contribution by filling in the mentioned gaps. Data were collected through questionnaires and interviews from a test group of Arabic-speaking participants with low and high English proficiency levels. The experimental clips were taken from the sitcom Modern Family and subtitled into Arabic using different conditions: conventional, dynamic, colour-coding and extra-notes subtitles. A control group of English-speaking participants watched the clips with the original English soundtrack without subtitles. The findings suggest that conventional subtitles did not result in higher irony reception than free-form subtitles, which demonstrated potential effects on the audience’s reception. Particularly, colour-coding subtitles resulted in significantly higher irony reception than in other conditions, though this was not statistically reflected across the experimental clips. The other subtitling conditions (dynamic and extra-notes) did not seem to have largely influenced the reception, either positively or negatively. Furthermore, ironic meanings were more successfully interpreted by participants with high English proficiency levels than those with low levels, but they seemed to react differently to the subtitling strategies. The data suggest that dynamic subtitles supported the reception of the participants with low English proficiency levels more than their counterparts, possibly indicating that dynamic subtitles were less tolerated by those who did not require them. Viewers’ attitudes towards the subtitling conditions were largely positive, but there was less enthusiasm for dynamic subtitles. Additionally, participants with low English proficiency levels seemed more interested in the use of free-form subtitles than participants with high proficiency levels. Overall, the findings suggest that Arabic viewers have deficits in comprehending irony. This was mirrored in the comparison of source language (SL) and target language (TL) viewers’ reception of irony, which was significantly higher for the English-speaking viewers than for the Arabic-speaking viewers. It follows that the multimodal composition of irony in films affects the accessibility of meanings, being more or less challenging to target audiences. The exploratory account points to the necessity of ensuring mediation for ironic events where accessibility to meaning-making resources could be at stake.9 0Item Restricted Exploring the Experiences of Three Saudi Mothers Returning to Saudi with Their Bilingual Children(Saudi Digital Library, 2025) Almuthibi ,Fatimah; Han, SophiaThis qualitative interview study explored the experiences of three Saudi mothers who returned to Saudi Arabia with their bilingual children after living with their children in English speaking countries for educational and academic purposes. Bronfenbrenner’s Bioecological Theory is the theory that served as the guiding framework for the study, shaping the direction of the study and informing both the analysis and discussion of the data. The purpose of the study was to gain a deeper understanding of this unique phenomenon and to address a gap in the existing literature since there are very few studies that focus on the post-return experience to Saudi Arabia. The data was collected and analyzed during the spring and summer of 2025 through virtual semi-structured interviews and member checking. Furthermore, the analysis followed the phases and strategies of thematic analysis. Therefore, the findings were organized into three overarching themes with subthemes under each theme. The overarching themes are: (a) Reintegrating into the Saudi Social and Educational Environments, (b) Strategies for Sustaining Bilingualism, and (c) Reflections and Advice on Returning to Saudi Arabia with Bilingual Children. Together, all these themes provide an interpretive discussion of the mothers’ return experiences from social, educational, and family life aspects, while also offering valuable implications for Saudi educational policymakers both inside and outside Saudi Arabia, as well as for Saudi parents and families navigating similar transitions. Finally, the study concludes with recommendations for future research.15 0Item Restricted Production and Comprehension of Verb Morphology in Saudi Arabic- Speaking Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder Aged 4;0 to 6;11(Saudi Digital Library, 2025) Alharbi, Deya; Prof. Clegg, Judy; Ozturk, OzgeDevelopmental language disorder (DLD) manifests differently across languages, with grammatical deficits varying based on linguistic typology. However, research on the impact of DLD on the acquisition of morphology in languages spoken in the global south, such as Arabic, remains limited. This study investigates verb morphology difficulties in comprehension and production among Saudi Arabic-speaking children with DLD compared to their typically developing (TD) peers. Sixty-seven Saudi Arabic-speaking children participated in this study. Verb morphology was assessed through a picture-naming task for production and a picture-selection task for comprehension. Both tasks examined verb inflections for tense (past, present, future) and subject-verb gender agreement (feminine, masculine) and number (singular, plural). Children with DLD scored significantly lower than their TD peers in comprehension and production of verb morphology. Both groups scored higher in production than comprehension for number agreement. However, children with DLD demonstrated comparable performance across production and comprehension for gender agreement and tense. The findings revealed distinct patterns across linguistic features. In gender agreement, feminine verbs posed the greatest challenge in production, whereas masculine verbs were the most difficult in comprehension. For number agreement, plural verbs were the most challenging in production, while singular verbs were the most difficult in comprehension. Future tense presented the greatest difficulty across tasks, marking the first investigation of future tense morphology in Arabic DLD research. This study is the first to investigate verb morphology comprehension in Arabic-speaking children with DLD and compare it to production within the same sample. The findings extend our understanding of DLD mechanisms, suggesting that language difficulties of Arabic-speaking children with DLD stem from combined deficits in linguistic knowledge and processing capacity. By addressing key gaps in Arabic DLD research, this study lays a foundation for further investigations and provides insights for clinicians and educators in developing targeted assessments and interventions.26 0Item Restricted Automatic Essay Scoring in Arabic: Development, Evaluation, and Advanced Techniques(University of Bristol, 2025) Ghazawi, Rayed; Simpson, EdwinAutomated Essay Scoring (AES) has advanced considerably due to recent progress in natural language processing (NLP). This thesis examines key challenges in AES, with a particular focus on the Arabic language, and proposes practical approaches informed by both computational techniques and educational theory. First, the research investigates how the formulation of essay questions affects the accuracy of automated scoring systems. A set of question-design criteria, derived from educational principles, is introduced and empirically tested. Experiments show that adherence to these criteria can significantly improve AES performance, with improvements of up to 40% observed using BERT-based models for English essays. Given the limited resources for Arabic AES, this thesis introduces the AR-AES dataset, consisting of 2046 essays from undergraduate students across multiple courses, annotated independently by two university instructors. This resource alleviates the scarcity of Arabic-language datasets for AES, supporting model development and evaluation. Experimental analyses using pretrained Arabic NLP models demonstrate that transformer-based approaches achieve the highest levels of agreement with human scores. In many cases, their predictions show greater consistency with the gold scores than the agreement observed between the human annotators themselves. This high level of agreement with human scores indicates that, under appropriate conditions, the proposed AES system may be suitable for assisting human markers in real-world educational settings. Additionally, the thesis explores the potential of large language models (LLMs), including ChatGPT, Llama, Aya, Jais, and ACEGPT for Arabic AES. Experiments with different training approaches, zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning, demonstrate the importance of prompt engineering. A mixed-language prompting strategy, combining Arabic essays with English scoring guidelines, was found to notably enhance model performance. Nonetheless, fine-tuned AraBERT consistently yielded the strongest results, indicating that LLMs may not yet be the most effective option for Arabic AES tasks when training data is limited. Finally, an active learning framework is introduced, integrating AraBERT with uncertainty- and diversity-based sampling strategies. This human-in-the-loop approach prioritises essays that most benefit from expert review, reducing the need for extensive manual annotation while preserving high-scoring accuracy. Rather than replacing human markers, the system complements their efforts, offering a more efficient and consistent approach to large-scale essay evaluation. Overall, this thesis advances AES by introducing explicit criteria for effective essay question design, while also addressing specific challenges in Arabic AES. It contributes a comprehensively annotated dataset, presents a systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art NLP models, and effectively integrates active learning to balance automated scoring accuracy and human involvement.14 0Item Restricted Investigating the Multimodal Meaning-Making of Wordplay in Arabic-Subtitled TV Series: An Audience Reception Study(University of Leeds, 2025-05) Alghanem, Sarah; Ramos Pinto, Sara; Sharov, Sergei; Munday, JeremyThis thesis investigates how Arabic subtitled humorous wordplay in the sitcom One Day at a Time is received and perceived by Saudi viewers. It investigates the effect of different translation strategies, language proficiency and the presence or absence of canned laughter and wordplay explicating gestures. In addition, it explores the interplay of these variables and how they influence reception and perception. While a large body of research has examined wordplay in both descriptive and theoretical approaches, research on the reception and perception of Arabic subtitled wordplay remains limited. Therefore, this thesis aims to fill this gap by providing findings from its reception and perception study to enhance the understanding of wordplay in audiovisual translation (AVT) practices in general, and more specifically in the context of Arabic subtitled audiovisual material. The reception study investigates the impact of different strategies (neutralisation and compensation) on viewers’ comprehension of wordplay, while the perception study explores their perceived levels of understanding and enjoyment. This thesis also seeks to contribute to the growing AVT practices in Saudi Arabia in light of Vision 2030, which gives particular attention to the entertainment and media industry.72 0Item Restricted The Use of Adjective Intensifiers by Najdi Dialect Speakers in Riyadh(University of Leeds, 2024) Alfuhaydi, Randah Abdullah; Evans, Mel; Wilson, James; Khamam, RubaThis thesis explores the functional devices used for adjective intensification by Najdi dialect speakers in Riyadh and the linguistic and social parameters conditioning their usage by operationalising a sociolinguistic variationist analysis. This study is one of the first investigating intensifiers in the Najdi dialect. The corpus in this study, which is based on interviews, consists of 148,023 words. Adjective intensifiers in the dataset are categorised according to the model of Quirk et al. (1985). Among the 3,508 adjectives in the data, only 540 (15.39%) were intensified. Within the adjective intensification system of Najdi dialect speakers, amplifiers (e.g., marrah ‘very’) were the most frequent, followed by emphasisers (e.g., waḷḷah ‘truly’) and downtoners (e.g., šwayy ‘a bit’). Within amplifiers, boosters like marrah ‘very’ were more frequent compared to maximisers such as tamāman ‘completely’. The social factors investigated in the variationist analysis are gender, age and education, while the linguistic factors are adjective semantic category, adjective syntactic function, adjective polarity, adjective emotionality, the seriousness of discussion topics and position of intensifier. Amplifiers were found to be highly sensitive to social factors, while downtoners were more conditioned by linguistic factors. Female speakers used amplifiers more frequently than male speakers. The two most common amplifiers, marrah and jiddan, had two different profiles and analysis of their usage in the aggregate data and in the speech of outliers underscored many social and linguistic aspects involved in their usage and change. Further, the booster marrah seems to be an enregistered marker of feminine linguistic style. Overall, this study paves the way for future research on Arabic intensifiers. It offers theoretical and methodological insights for advancing the field of sociolinguistics, especially in relation to the variation of discourse-pragmatic features, the stylistic analysis of individual speakers and the implementation of digital discourse in sociolinguistic enquiries. It is also likely to be significant across various linguistic disciplines, such as language teaching and language acquisition25 0Item Restricted Towards Representative Pre-training Corpora for Arabic Natural Language Processing(Clarkson University, 2024-11-30) Alshahrani, Saied Falah A; Matthews, JeannaNatural Language Processing (NLP) encompasses various tasks, problems, and algorithms that analyze human-generated textual corpora or datasets to produce insights, suggestions, or recommendations. These corpora and datasets are crucial for any NLP task or system, as they convey social concepts, including views, culture, heritage, and perspectives of native speakers. However, a corpus or dataset in a particular language does not necessarily represent the culture of its native speakers. Native speakers may organically write some textual corpora or datasets, and some may be written by non-native speakers, translated from other languages, or generated using advanced NLP technologies, such as Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet, in the era of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between human-generated texts and machine-translated or machine-generated texts, especially when all these different types of texts, i.e., corpora or datasets, are combined to create large corpora or datasets for pre-training NLP tasks, systems, and technologies. Therefore, there is an urgent need to study the degree to which pre-training corpora or datasets represent native speakers and reflect their values, beliefs, cultures, and perspectives, and to investigate the potentially negative implications of using unrepresentative corpora or datasets for the NLP tasks, systems, and technologies. One of the most widely utilized pre-training corpora or datasets for NLP are Wikipedia articles, especially for low-resource languages like Arabic, due to their large multilingual content collection and massive array of metadata that can be quantified. In this dissertation, we study the representativeness of the Arabic NLP pre-training corpora or datasets, focusing specifically on the three Arabic Wikipedia editions: Arabic Wikipedia, Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia, and Moroccan Arabic Wikipedia. Our primary goals are to 1) raise awareness of the potential negative implications of using unnatural, inorganic, and unrepresentative corpora—those generated or translated automatically without the input of native speakers, 2) find better ways to promote transparency and ensure that native speakers are involved through metrics, metadata, and online applications, and 3) strive to reduce the impact of automatically generated or translated contents by using machine learning algorithms to identify or detect them automatically. To do this, firstly, we analyze the metadata of the three Arabic Wikipedia editions, focusing on differences using collected statistics such as total pages, articles, edits, registered and active users, administrators, and top editors. We document issues related to the automatic creation and translation of articles (content pages) from English to Arabic without human (i.e., native speakers) review, revision, or supervision. Secondly, we quantitatively study the performance implications of using unnatural, inorganic corpora that do not represent native speakers and are primarily generated using automation, such as bot-created articles or template-based translation. We intrinsically evaluate the performance of two main NLP tasks—Word Representation and Language Modeling—using the Word Analogy and Fill-Mask evaluation tasks on our two newly created datasets: the Arab States Analogy Dataset and the Masked Arab States Dataset. Thirdly, we assess the quality of Wikipedia corpora at the edition level rather than the article level by quantifying bot activities and enhancing Wikipedia’s Depth metric. After analyzing the limitations of the existing Depth metric, we propose a bot-free version by excluding bot-created articles and bot-made edits on articles called the DEPTH+ metric, presenting its mathematical definitions, highlighting its features and limitations, and explaining how this new metric accurately reflects human collaboration depth within the Wikipedia project. Finally, we address the issue of template translation in the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia by identifying these template-translated articles and their characteristics. We explore the content of the three Arabic Wikipedia editions in terms of density, quality, and human contributions and employ the resulting insights to build multivariate machine learning classifiers leveraging article metadata to automatically detect template-translated articles. We lastly deploy the best-performing classifier publicly as an online application and release the extracted, filtered, labeled, and preprocessed datasets to the research community to benefit from our datasets and the web-based detection system.86 0Item Restricted Understanding Family Language Policies in Saudi Sojourning Families: insights from Mothers in Melbourne.(Monash University, 2024) Alsubaie, Samah; Fang, NinaThis study investigates how ten Saudi sojourning mothers in Melbourne manage Family Language Policy (FLP) decisions regarding their children's language development. Unlike immigrants, who aim for long-term integration, sojourners live abroad temporarily, planning to return to their home country. Much research has been conducted on immigrants; however, few studies have focused on sojourners, particularly Saudi sojourning mothers. Therefore, they are the focus of this study. Using a qualitative approach, including semi-structured interviews, the study finds that all mothers prioritize maintaining Arabic for religious, cultural, and educational reasons. The research reveals the significant influence of external societal pressures and internal family dynamics on FLP choices, leading to a gap between the mothers' declared language ideologies and their actual practices. Despite these challenges, the mothers show a strong commitment to preserving their children's first language (L1) through consistent strategies. A key finding is the positive impact of fathers' active involvement in language education, which not only enhances language acquisition but also strengthens family unity and authority. The study highlights the complexities of FLP in transnational families and offers valuable insights into how parental roles and external factors shape language policies.46 0Item Restricted Expanding our understanding of the uses of Modern Standard and Hijazi Colloquial Arabic in Education: A Study Exploring Learners’ Attention, Academic Performance, and Language Attitudes in Saudi Arabia(University of Sussex, 2024-07) Alamir, Sarah; Blair, Andrew; Alkabani, FerasThis study investigates how the use of Hijazi Colloquial Arabic (HCA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in oral instruction affects students' sustained auditory attention and academic performance and their attitudes towards both varieties in education. To form a clear picture of how effective both varieties are, the results of a nine-week pre-post-test classroom experiment, a follow-up questionnaire, and interviews were used for analysis. First, two groups of undergraduate female students (aged between 20 and 27) assigned to the 'History of the Americas' module at Umm Al-Qura University and a professor were selected for the experiment. One group had 29 students, whereas the other had 25. One group was instructed in MSA, and the other in HCA. The study findings showed that both HCA and MSA oral instruction improved the students' ability to sustain auditory attention, leading to better academic performance, with HCA instruction being slightly more effective. In addition, the disparities in automaticity and language execution between HCA and MSA were negligible. When it comes to attitudes, both HCA and MSA groups had more positive perceptions of MSA. Their actions, however, did not reflect their beliefs and feelings. Their attitudes and the underlying reasons could be grouped into six and five categories. Globally speaking, standard codes in diglossic contexts receive positive attitudes despite the changing social circumstances, while societal changes impact colloquial codes’ perceptions. These results implicate the field of higher education in Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries when considering using Colloquial Arabic codes (CAs) as a medium of instruction, as they should go hand in hand with MSA. This can be done by further research and modifying language policies to promote the coexistence between the two codes, combining them in instruction according to contexts and the psychological aspects instructors want to provoke, and using non-featured CAs, such as the educated HCA or White dialect.51 0Item Restricted Children’s Development of the Arabic Emphatic Consonants; An Acoustic Investigation(Macquarie University, 2024-02) Alkhudidi, Anwar; Benders, Titia; Demuth, Katherine; Holt, Rebecca; Szalay, TuendeThis thesis examines the developmental trajectory in the production of plain-emphatic consonant contrasts among Saudi-Hijazi-Arabic-speaking children aged 3 to 6 years. The production of the articulatory complex emphatic consonants involves a primary coronal constriction and a secondary pharyngeal/uvular constriction. Acoustically, emphatics exert a strong anticipatory and carryover coarticulatory influence that can extend to all segments within the same word, a phenomenon termed ‘emphasis spread’(e.g., J. Al-Tamimi, 2017; Card, 1983; Jongman et al., 2011; Khattab et al., 2006; Zawaydeh & de Jong, 2011). Prior research, primarily based on impressionistic data, suggests emphatic segments are typically late acquired, after the age of 4 years (e.g., Alqattan, 2015; Amayreh, 2003; Amayreh & Dyson, 1998). However, auditory judgments may not fully capture the subtle developmental changes or gradations in the production of these consonants that are detectable through acoustic analysis (Macken & Barton, 1980; Mashaqba et al., 2022). Consequently, this thesis aims to acoustically examine the acquisition route of these complex emphatic consonants, focusing on both the consonantal and vocalic cues to the plain-emphatic contrast across different phonetic contexts. Specifically, this thesis acoustically examines the production of emphatic consonants across different word positions, initial, medial, and final, across three vocalic contexts, /aː/, /iː/, and /uː/, and whether the effect of the emphatic segment extends bidirectionally beyond the immediately adjacent vowel. Target consonants examined were the voiceless plain-emphatic obstruents /t/ vs. /tˤ/ and /s/ vs. /sˤ/. A single-word repetition task was used to elicit speech from 38 Saudi-Hijazi -Arabic-speaking children aged between 3;1 to 6;11, and 13 adults serving as reference data. The acoustic measurements taken were VOT of stops and F1 and F2 of adjacent vowels. Across these three studies, children demonstrate a non-linear developmental trajectory, initially showing a faster increase in the size of the plain-emphatic contrast with age, with the rate of this increase slowing down as children grow older. Furthermore, there is substantial alignment between child and adult production patterns concerning positional effects, vowel context effects, and emphasis spread patterns, highlighting the potential role of input on the development of emphatic consonants. Finally, female children produced, on average, larger contrasts than males. The findings of each study are discussed in relation to previous literature on emphatic production in adults, serving as a benchmark for understanding the developmental stages and strategies observed by children. References to various aspects of child phonology and production, including the cross-linguistic development of coarticulation, are also discussed.52 0
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