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Does diacritics‐based lexical disambiguation modulate word frequency, length, and predictability effects? An eye‐movements investigation of processing Arabic diacritics

In Arabic, a predominantly consonantal script that features a high incidence of lexical ambiguity (heterophonic homographs), glyph-like marks called diacritics supply vowel information that clarifies how each consonant should be pronounced, and thereby disambiguate the pronunciation of consonantal s...

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Autores principales: Hermena, Ehab W., Bouamama, Sana, Liversedge, Simon P., Drieghe, Denis
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8592420/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34780557
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259987
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author Hermena, Ehab W.
Bouamama, Sana
Liversedge, Simon P.
Drieghe, Denis
author_facet Hermena, Ehab W.
Bouamama, Sana
Liversedge, Simon P.
Drieghe, Denis
author_sort Hermena, Ehab W.
collection PubMed
description In Arabic, a predominantly consonantal script that features a high incidence of lexical ambiguity (heterophonic homographs), glyph-like marks called diacritics supply vowel information that clarifies how each consonant should be pronounced, and thereby disambiguate the pronunciation of consonantal strings. Diacritics are typically omitted from print except in situations where a particular homograph is not sufficiently disambiguated by the surrounding context. In three experiments we investigated whether the presence of disambiguating diacritics on target homographs modulates word frequency, length, and predictability effects during reading. In all experiments, the subordinate representation of the target homographs was instantiated by the diacritics (in the diacritized conditions), and by the context subsequent to the target homographs. The results replicated the effects of word frequency (Experiment 1), word length (Experiment 2), and predictability (Experiment 3). However, there was no evidence that diacritics-based disambiguation modulated these effects in the current study. Rather, diacritized targets in all experiments attracted longer first pass and later (go past and/or total fixation count) processing. These costs are suggested to be a manifestation of the subordinate bias effect. Furthermore, in all experiments, the diacritics-based disambiguation facilitated later sentence processing, relative to when the diacritics were absent. The reported findings expand existing knowledge about processing of diacritics, their contribution towards lexical ambiguity resolution, and sentence processing.
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spelling pubmed-85924202021-11-16 Does diacritics‐based lexical disambiguation modulate word frequency, length, and predictability effects? An eye‐movements investigation of processing Arabic diacritics Hermena, Ehab W. Bouamama, Sana Liversedge, Simon P. Drieghe, Denis PLoS One Research Article In Arabic, a predominantly consonantal script that features a high incidence of lexical ambiguity (heterophonic homographs), glyph-like marks called diacritics supply vowel information that clarifies how each consonant should be pronounced, and thereby disambiguate the pronunciation of consonantal strings. Diacritics are typically omitted from print except in situations where a particular homograph is not sufficiently disambiguated by the surrounding context. In three experiments we investigated whether the presence of disambiguating diacritics on target homographs modulates word frequency, length, and predictability effects during reading. In all experiments, the subordinate representation of the target homographs was instantiated by the diacritics (in the diacritized conditions), and by the context subsequent to the target homographs. The results replicated the effects of word frequency (Experiment 1), word length (Experiment 2), and predictability (Experiment 3). However, there was no evidence that diacritics-based disambiguation modulated these effects in the current study. Rather, diacritized targets in all experiments attracted longer first pass and later (go past and/or total fixation count) processing. These costs are suggested to be a manifestation of the subordinate bias effect. Furthermore, in all experiments, the diacritics-based disambiguation facilitated later sentence processing, relative to when the diacritics were absent. The reported findings expand existing knowledge about processing of diacritics, their contribution towards lexical ambiguity resolution, and sentence processing. Public Library of Science 2021-11-15 /pmc/articles/PMC8592420/ /pubmed/34780557 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259987 Text en © 2021 Hermena et al https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Hermena, Ehab W.
Bouamama, Sana
Liversedge, Simon P.
Drieghe, Denis
Does diacritics‐based lexical disambiguation modulate word frequency, length, and predictability effects? An eye‐movements investigation of processing Arabic diacritics
title Does diacritics‐based lexical disambiguation modulate word frequency, length, and predictability effects? An eye‐movements investigation of processing Arabic diacritics
title_full Does diacritics‐based lexical disambiguation modulate word frequency, length, and predictability effects? An eye‐movements investigation of processing Arabic diacritics
title_fullStr Does diacritics‐based lexical disambiguation modulate word frequency, length, and predictability effects? An eye‐movements investigation of processing Arabic diacritics
title_full_unstemmed Does diacritics‐based lexical disambiguation modulate word frequency, length, and predictability effects? An eye‐movements investigation of processing Arabic diacritics
title_short Does diacritics‐based lexical disambiguation modulate word frequency, length, and predictability effects? An eye‐movements investigation of processing Arabic diacritics
title_sort does diacritics‐based lexical disambiguation modulate word frequency, length, and predictability effects? an eye‐movements investigation of processing arabic diacritics
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8592420/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34780557
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259987
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