In Modern Standard Arabic punctuation marks are less frequent than in European languages. Using discourse markers is instead preferred, which tends to yield long clauses. This, in turn, is assumed to foster sentence splitting in translation from Arabic into English and into Spanish. This assumption was tested on a sample of 470 554 words from a…

What makes some sentences more difficult to process, and why? Memory- and expectation-based theories both attempt to explain sentence processing difficulties, and decades of sentence processing literature have found evidence in support of both theories. This dissertation further investigates these theories of sentence processing by exploring…

Purpose: This study aimed to evaluate the stability of phonological awareness (PA) and language achievements between kindergarten and first grade among Arabic-speaking children. Method: A total of 1,158 children were assessed in PA and language skills in both grades and were classified based on distinct and integrated achievements on PA and…

This article reports a part of a larger study which examines the sociolinguistic dynamics within the Hausa community in Saudi Arabia. It focuses on how second-generation members of the Hausa Saudi community perceive their ethnic identity and investigates the relationship between their proficiency in the Hausa heritage language and their sense of…

Purpose: The study tested macro- and microstructure narrative skills in kindergarten Arabic-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and in age-matched children with typical language development (TLD). Specifically, it compared narrative skills in the two groups of children in two story modes: storytelling in Spoken Arabic…

Societies cannot destroy the old system of faith while accepting a new religion. Human begins to transform the new belief system within the old belief system. One of the things they have to convert is the terminology of religion, which they accept. The change process of this new religious terminology can give concrete findings about the learning,…

Purpose: We compare right-to-left and left-to-right orthographies to test the theory, derived from studying the latter, that small temporal asynchronies between the two eyes at the beginning and end of every fixation favor ocular prevalence for the left eye in the left hemifield and the right eye in the right hemifield. Ocular prevalence is the…

Verb morphology difficulties have been widely attested in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) who speak English and other languages. This research contributes data on a variety of Arabic, a richly inflected Semitic language. The current study examined the production of subject-verb agreement morphology in three groups of 30…

Cultural brokers play a critical role of helping researchers navigate cultural and language barriers to gain insight into communities. This paper focuses on one cultural broker who helped facilitate community-based research among the refugee community. Her professionalism, expertise and knowledge of the community made her a valuable resource for…

Limited research has been conducted on the literacy skills of Arabic-speaking refugee children. This study investigated the concurrent and longitudinal roles of morphological awareness in Arabic word reading and reading comprehension. A total of 75 Syrian refugee children aged 6-13 years resettled in Canada were administered measures of nonverbal…

Research on emotions and second language learning has recently expanded to heritage language education contexts. Influenced by a long tradition in psycholinguistics and second language acquisition, research on heritage language emotions has mainly focused on the statistical effects of emotions on language development rather than examining emotions…

The availability of a first language translation equivalent (i.e., congruency) has repeatedly been shown to influence second-language collocation processing in decontextualized tasks. However, no study to date has examined how L2 speakers process congruent/incongruent collocations on-line in a real-world context. The present study aimed to fill…

The present study examines cultural representations in two widely used AFL textbook series, namely "Al-Kitaab" and "Arabiyyat al-Naas." Fundamentally, three main issues motivate this study: (1) the cultural politics of language textbooks underlying the construction and dissemination of cultural knowledge and its prioritization…

This study aims to shed light on the contribution of universal versus language specific factors on reading. We examined eye movements of Arabic readers and analyzed effects specific to Arabic such as perceptual complexity, diglossia and morphology, in addition to universal factors such as word length and frequency. Twenty native Arabic speakers…

This dissertation investigates the extent to which bilingual speakers' cognitive representations of the syntactic structures of their two languages are interconnected. This is a substantially understudied domain despite the widespread existence of bilingual/multilingual communities in the world, including the US. To draw solid conclusions about…