The Reading Comprehension Process of Arabic Garden-Path Sentences: An Equivocal Effect

Abstract

The aims of this study were two-fold : first, to investigate the effect of a heterophonic homographic initial of a sentence (HP-HG) on the reading process of beginning Arabic readers as they read for comprehension; and second, to examine the role of the correct short vowels and diacritics in resolving garden-path (GP) ambiguity. Thirty-nine native monolingual Arab male fourth- grade students aged between 9 and 10, participated in reading 31 sentences representing three reading conditions, plain, vowelized-discretized, and wrongly vowelized, using a self-paced reading software program. The results showed that the GP structure of Arabic sentences did not affect the reading process of the beginning Arabic readers, nor was their process of reading such sentences significantly improved or shortened by the disambiguating short vowels and diacritics. However, examining the means descriptively shows that on average, the GP sentences took more time for the students to read but were comprehended better than their counterparts. Different proposed explanations were suggested, and a good-enough model is a good candidate to start with. One important factor that arose in all possible interpretations for the ineffectiveness of the GP structure on the reading comprehension process of Arab children (and adults) resides in the nature of Arabic morphology by supposedly maintaining the core root of the initial HP-HG words during GP sentence processing. Assessing the same phenomenon with different populations of low-skilled Arab children and learners of Arabic as a second language is recommended because they are both accustomed to reading a vowelized-diacritized script and their mastery of Arabic morphology is assumedly developing.