ORCID Identifiers
Document Type
Article
Source of Publication
PLoS ONE
Publication Date
11-1-2021
Abstract
In Arabic, a predominantly consonantal script that features a high incidence of lexical ambiguity (heterophonic homographs), glyph-like marks called diacritics supply vowel information that clarifies how each consonant should be pronounced, and thereby disambiguate the pronunciation of consonantal strings. Diacritics are typically omitted from print except in situations where a particular homograph is not sufficiently disambiguated by the surrounding context. In three experiments we investigated whether the presence of disambiguating diacritics on target homographs modulates word frequency, length, and predictability effects during reading. In all experiments, the subordinate representation of the target homographs was instantiated by the diacritics (in the diacritized conditions), and by the context subsequent to the target homographs. The results replicated the effects of word frequency (Experiment 1), word length (Experiment 2), and predictability (Experiment 3). However, there was no evidence that diacritics-based disambiguation modulated these effects in the current study. Rather, diacritized targets in all experiments attracted longer first pass and later (go past and/or total fixation count) processing. These costs are suggested to be a manifestation of the subordinate bias effect. Furthermore, in all experiments, the diacritics-based disambiguation facilitated later sentence processing, relative to when the diacritics were absent. The reported findings expand existing knowledge about processing of diacritics, their contribution towards lexical ambiguity resolution, and sentence processing.
DOI Link
Publisher
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Volume
16
Issue
11 November
Disciplines
Linguistics
Scopus ID
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Hermena, Ehab W.; Bouamama, Sana; Liversedge, Simon P.; and Drieghe, Denis, "Does diacritics-based lexical disambiguation modulate word frequency, length, and predictability effects? An eye-movements investigation of processing Arabic diacritics" (2021). All Works. 4657.
https://zuscholars.zu.ac.ae/works/4657
Indexed in Scopus
yes
Open Access
yes
Open Access Type
Gold: This publication is openly available in an open access journal/series