About the Neural Basis of Arabic Diglossia: Behavioral and Event- Related Potential Analysis of Word Processing in Spoken and Literary Arabic

The diglossic context of Arabic refers to the use of two language varieties within the same speech community in everyday life. Spoken Arabic (SA) is acquired first and used for everyday informal communication, while Literary Arabic (LA, referred to also as Modern Standard Arabic, or MSA) is acquired mainly at school and is used for reading, writing and formal functions. One question that has been raised relates to whether LA functions as a second language and whether diglossia represents a particular form of bilingualism. This chapter reviews some of the previous experimental psycholinguistic findings in this field of research. In addition, it presents new behavioral and brain research data and discusses recently published findings supporting the claim that brain-based language dominance in the diglossic situation is modality-dependent. The results and discussion presented here suggest that literate native speakers of Arabic who master the use of both SA and LA function as if they had two first languages: One in the auditory modality (SA) and one in the visual written modality (LA). During language production tasks, SA and LA might behave very similarly, although competitively as two first languages. The fact that SA and LA exchange places as dominant and less dominant language variety as a function of the modality and that they compete similarly in the oral modality do not allow to conclude that they represent two separate linguistic systems. Because the conclusions presented here might not seem warranted at this stage of research in this field, we propose that further research will be needed to better understand the representation of, and the interactions between, the two varieties of Arabic.