We tested the effects of diglossia and orthography on reading in Arabic, manipulating reading in Spoken Arabic (SA), using Arabizi, in which it is written using Latin letters on computers/phones, and the two forms of the conventional written form Modern Standard Arabic (MSA): vowelled (shallow) and unvowelled (deep). 77 skilled readers in 8th…

The connection between language and reading is well established across many languages studied to date. Little is known, however, about the role of language in reading in Arabic--a Semitic language characterized by diglossia--in which the oral and written varieties differ across language components. This study examined the relationship among…

This report reviews evidence that there are differences between oral and written English that lead to differences in the skills and knowledge necessary to comprehend them. Three categories of differences are considered in an attempt to derive specific, testable hypotheses: differences in the physical nature of speech and writing, differences in…