Reading in Arabic: New Evidence for the Role of Vowel Signs

The aim of this study was to examine the effect of vowelization on reading Arabic orthography. Native children speakers of Arabic were asked to read aloud words (vowelized and unvowelized) and pseudowords. The results showed that unvowelized words were read aloud more quickly and more accurately than the shallow fully vowelized Arabic words. The disadvantage of vowelized words in both speed and accuracy was therefore unexpected, and, furthermore, inconsistent with findings from several other relevant studies. The results suggested that Arab children used a different perceptual and coding strategy when the stimuli differ in their lexical feature (word vs pseudoword) and visual/orthographic feature (vowelized vs unvowelized).