The different level of transparency of letter-sound mapping in various orthographies has been found to influence reading development across languages. The Hebrew orthography represents a special case of within language design with two versions of the script, a transparent (vowelized) and an opaque one (unvowelized). In this study we conducted a…

The purpose of the present study was to examine the influence of some aspects of the Arabic phonological system on spelling English words. In Study 1, the spelling performance of Arabic students from grades four and six was compared with English students in cognate phoneme pairs which exist across both languages (/d/ and /t/), and pairs in which…

Semitic writing systems such as that used to write Arabic are unique among st alphabetic writing systems in that in Semitic systems short vowels are represented as diacritics on consonant letters, and not represented at Allin text intended for skilled readers. Arabic is unique here in that the letter used to represent a consonant differs in shape…