Different Orthographies Different Context Effects: The Effects of Arabic Sentence Context in Skilled and Poor Readers

This study was designed to investigate whether Arabic orthography differs from an alphabetic orthography regarding context effects among poor and skilled readers. Usually, Arabic texts are presented without vowels to skilled readers, and with vowels for younger and beginning readers. The Arabic vowels are not alphabetic letters, but strokes above and/or below the letters. The subjects were 40 eighth graders, 20 poor readers and 20 skilled readers of Arabic. Subjects were required to read voweled and unvoweled words with and without context in Arabic. The results showed that skilled as well as poor readers significantly improved their reading accuracy when they read voweled and unvoweled words in context. Further, skilled readers significantly improved their reading voweled and unvoweled words in context more than did the poor readers. The findings of this study showed the significance of linguistic considerations for the development of reading theory.