Visual word recognition and vowelization in Arabic: New evidence from verbal-patterns recognition

The present study examined the role of vowelization diacritics in the visual recognition of written Arabic verbs among typical (N = 20) and poor (N = 20) native Arab readers in the 10th grade. A lexical decision task was used, in which stimuli were presented under two vowelization conditions: vowelized and non-vowelized. The findings revealed that typical readers demonstrated higher accuracy and shorter response times in the non-vowelized condition. In contrast, the effect of vowelization on the performance of poor readers was inconsistent across measures. The results are discussed in light of previous findings in the literature, with particular emphasis on the contribution of morpho-orthographic components to the visual recognition of Arabic verbs.