Word recognition of Arabic as a foreign language by American learners : The role of phonology and script

This study reports an investigation into the role of phonological encoding (speech recoding) and visual processes in word recognition of American learners of Arabic as a foreign language (AFL). In a silent reading task, a total of 36 subjects, twenty-seven non-native readers of Arabic-- beginning, intermediate, and advanced--as well as nine native readers participated in two experiments identifying Arabic words at the word level (experiment I) and sentence level (experiment II). The word recognition task was either phonological or visual. Word recognition was measured by the type and rate of errors made. The results indicated that the level of student proficiency was significant (p <.0001) in both experiments; errors decreased as language proficiency increased with a significant interaction effect (p <.02) in experiment II. Moreover, results showed a predominance of visual errors in experiment I and phonological errors in experiment II. Although the topic requires further investigation, the findings indicated that American learners appear to misidentify Arabic words that either have a high visual similarity, or have certain sounds which are not existent in English such as (h, x, and c ).