Reading acquisition in Arabic presents unique challenges, notably due to its complex morphological structure and the diglossic nature of the language. The discrepancy between written (Modern Standard) and spoken Arabic poses significant barriers for learners, particularly in decoding morphologically complex words. This study explored the role of…

Purpose: This study examined the differences in spoken Arabic (SpA) and standard Arabic (StA) in inflectional (gender, number, possessive pronouns, and tense) construction use in Arabic among preschoolers. Moreover, we tested the contribution of the inflectional constructions possessed in kindergarten to reading skills in the first grade and…

This study examined affix letter spelling among 6th grade Hebrew-speaking children with dyslexia compared with chronologically age-matched and reading level-matched controls. As different languages are characterized by multiple dimensions of affix spelling complexity, we specifically targeted the following unique dimensions relevant to Hebrew: (1)…

This study examines the link between phonological and morphological awareness and reading comprehension among special-education children who attend self-contained special education classes in regular Arab elementary schools.The three hypotheses were: First, the higher the level of phonological awareness in Arabic among special education learners,…

The purpose of the current study was to examine whether morphological awareness measured before children are taught to read (Kindergarten in Israel) predicts reading accuracy and fluency in the middle of first grade, at the very beginning of the process of learning to read pointed Hebrew -- a highly transparent orthography, and whether this…

Acquisition of oral English verb morphology presents difficulties for bilinguals, learners of EFL and English-speaking monolingual children with specific language impairment. This study aimed to identify challenging English verb inflections among sixth grade speakers of Arabic (N = 85) and Hebrew (N = 86) using an elicited oral narrative task, and…

The morphological structure of the word has a central function in the organization of the mental lexicon and word recognition. Polymorphemic words in Arabic are composed of two non-concatenated morphemes: root and word-pattern. This study is the first to address the issue of nominal-pattern priming among young developing Arabic speakers. I…

This study investigated the effects of the Arabic root in the visual word recognition process among young readers in order to explore its role in reading acquisition and its development within the structure of the Arabic mental lexicon. We examined cross-modal priming of words that were derived from the same root of the target…

The masked priming paradigm was used to examine the role of the root and verb pattern morphemes in lexical access within the verb system of Arabic. Three groups participated in the study: grade 6 dyslexics, a reading-level-matched group and grade 6 normal readers. The first group consisted of: 28 grade 6 reading disabled (RD) students, 8 girls and…