The current study followed literacy skills development amongst 79 Arabic native speaking pupils from kindergarten to fourth grade. Based on reading comprehension attainments in fourth grade, two groups of skilled and poor readers were identified. Poor readers showed significantly lower performance on measures of phonological and morphological…

A large linguistic distance exists between spoken Arabic and the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) the literary language (a diglosia). Novice readers, therefore, struggle with the complex orthography of Arabic as well as the mastering of MSA. Here, we tested whether structured activities in MSA would advance kindergarteners' MSA aptitude by the end of…

The goal of the present study was to extend the models explaining the missing-letter effect (MLE) to an additional language and orthography, and to test the role of phonology in silent reading in Arabic. We also examined orthographic effects such as letter position and letter shape, morphological effects such as pseudo-prefixes, and phonological…