Memoria colectiva

In Arabic, for many words, different words that have distinct spellings when written with diacritics can appear identical when written without short vowels. The resulting ambiguity has been supposed to necessitate greater reliance on context to disambiguate the lexical entries corresponding to unvowelised letter strings, in reading, to permit visual word recognition prior to establishing meaning through comprehension processes (Abu-Hamour, 2013; Abu-Rabia, 1997a; Saiegh-Haddad, 2004).

EXAMPLE:

wrote (kataba)

بتك

بتك

It can be seen from the vowelised forms that differences are small and require good visual perception skills:

wrote (kataba)

ب ت ك

ب ت ك

According to Abu-Rabia and Taha (2006), homographs are abundant in standard printed Arabic text, possibly so much so that every second or third word is a heterophonic homograph. Arabic is considered to have many more homographs than Hebrew (Ibrahim, 2009a) and it has been estimated that in Hebrew almost one in four words in unpointed text are homographic if seen out of context (Shimron & Sivan, 1994). An equivalent example in English would be ‘bll’ which could be ‘ball’, ‘bell’, ‘bill’ or ‘bull’. ‘He rang’ or ‘he paid’ would make it quite clear which meaning was intended. In Arabic, ‘he paid’ would be one word and ‘the bill’ would be another word.

It has been argued that a list of words without diacritics and lacking context should not make sense because, despite looking identical, they could entertain a number of different meanings (Abu-Rabia, 1997a). This is because “…when short

vowels are not present, sentence context becomes a crucial factor for

disambiguating homographs…” (Abu-Rabia & Taha, 2006, p.325). However, as suggested earlier, the correspondence between morphology and orthography makes it easier to identify at least one possible alternative for each letter string. In the absence of a disambiguating sentence context, if people are able to read aloud isolated

heterophonic homographs, they must have another way of reaching the specific word form required.

Early psycholinguistics research in Arabic indicated that skilled readers read without the help of short vowels (diacritics) and use grammatical and semantic information to disambiguate heterophonic homographs when they appear in printed text (Abu-Rabia, 1997a; 1997b; 1998). If presented with a single word without diacritics, readers have to work out the diacritics, or rely on their existing knowledge of words, or both. The relatively high proportion of ambiguity in written Arabic may mean that readers have to deduce the word and its full word pattern from the root consonants which are present (Boudelaa, 2014; Boudelaa & Marslen-Wilson, 2005). Whether a word is homographic or not is therefore highly significant because

different cognitive processes and routes of access to the mental lexicon may be involved. For this reason, homography will be considered the most important feature and focal point of this study in terms of conducting a name agreement survey and the word naming and lexical decision studies.

The prevalence of homographs may mean that readers have to rely more on other information when decoding unvowelised words. Arabic is considered to be a

transparent orthography when written with diacritics and a deep orthography when written without diacritics (Taouk & Coltheart, 2004). Many studies have reported that adult readers have to use their existing vocabulary and previous reading and knowledge of literary Arabic, in addition to morphology (e.g., Abu-Rabia, 1998; Abu-Rabia, Share, & Mansour, 2003) in order to correctly read and understand the written word. They may access a word in the mental lexicon they have seen before, possibly many times, which would fit the context, or they may use their knowledge of the core meaning given by a consonantal root and their knowledge of how words are structured to infer the meaning. For example, knowledge of word patterns, stored separately, could determine whether the word was a noun or verb.

Two types of homograph are found in Arabic, heterophonic and homophonic. Heterophonic homographs occur only in the absence of diacritics. The series of letters which appears on the page or screen affords numerous possible combinations of diacritics (Taouk & Colheart, 2004) which would, in turn, typically yield a different pronunciation for each combination.

For example, the letter string بتك unvowelised/without diacritics allows a number of possibilities including:

ب ت ك KaTaBa (he wrote) ب ت ك KuTiba (it was written)

بَّت ك KaTTaBa (he forced (someone) to write)

Homophonic homographs are words with the same spelling, even with diacritics, and pronunciation, but which have different meanings (Taouk & Coltheart, 2004). An example of this can be seen in the word ت ي ب BaYT which can mean either a house or a couplet in poetry.

The use of root morphemes to construct words leads to frequent occurrence of homographs when short vowels are omitted, and many words will share the same sequence of consonants (Taouk & Coltheart, 2004) even though they can be read in a given context as distinct lexical entities (Azzam, 1993). Share and Levin (1999) have asserted that, in Hebrew, affixation is one of the causes of homography and places additional demands on readers. An unvowelised string can be read in different ways according to the way in which the reader completes the word. Diacritics not only determine the pronunciation of a letter string but carry syntactical information. Diacritics are different for nouns and verbs, and therefore a consonantal string which lacks diacritics can be read as either a noun or a verb. Moreover, many such letter strings can be read as more than one noun and verb, which have different

morphological features and belong to different parts of speech.

The database of 1,474 words described in chapter four has been developed with the aim of harnessing some of the morphological resources of the Arabic language. Heterophonic homographs (letter strings with multiple vowelisations, pronunciations and meanings) and non-homographs are included. For homographs, name agreement has been used to determine which vowelisation, pronunciation and meaning can be considered correct (dominant) for use in the experiments in this study and also in future psycholinguistics experiments. The database will permit detailed investigation into disambiguation of homographs in Arabic, thus revealing more about the relationship between morphology, phonology and orthography and the cognitive processes involved.