Letter connectedness and Arabic visual word recognition

Abstract

This study investigates the processing consequences of letter connectedness during Arabic visual word recognition. Specifically, this study examined (a) whether there is a processing cost associated with letter connectedness during word-level reading and (b) whether this factor modulates form-level activation among words during lexical access. Experiment 1 tested one-, two-, and three-chunk Arabic words and nonwords in a lexical decision task with masked identity priming. Experiment 2 tested the same stimuli in a lexical decision task with masked form priming, in which prime–target pairs differed by a letter associated with the morphological root. In both experiments, there was a clear processing cost for letter connectedness—one-chunk words had longer processing times than two-chunk words, which had longer processing times than three-chunk words. Comparable processing time differences were also found for nonwords, suggesting that letter connectedness influences Arabic word recognition at a prelexical orthographic processing stage. Furthermore, although reliable priming was found in both the experiments, there was a suggestion that letter connectedness modulated form priming effects (Experiment 2), with the strongest effect for three-chunk word targets. These findings are taken to indicate that letter connectedness is an important factor that should be considered—and controlled for—in examinations of Arabic visual word recognition.