The cognitive processes involved in learning to read in Arabic

Semitic writing systems such as that used towrite Arabic are unique amongst alphabeticwriting systems in that in Semitic systemsshort vowels are represented as diacritics onconsonant letters, and not represented at allin text intended for skilled readers. Arabic isunique here in that the letter used torepresent a consonant differs in shape as afunction of the position of that letter in theletter sequence. These features of writtenArabic make the study of learning to read inthis language of particular interest. Westudied the acquisition of Arabic reading inchildren in Grades 3, 4 and 6, and also testedadult readers Our results indicated (a) despitethe orthographic differences between the Arabicand English writing systems learning to readArabic, like learning to read English, ischaracterised by the existence of an initial``discrimination-net'' phase, followed by aphonological-recoding phase, after which thereis a gradual transition to an orthographicphase and (b) that children do not acquirefluency in the position-specific properties ofthe script until rather late during the courseof reading acquisition, though skilled readershave this knowledge so deeply engrained that itis difficult for them to process written textconsisting of letters that represent the rightphonemes in the right positions but which arewritten in forms inappropriate for theirpositions in the orthographic sequence.