Graduation Semester and Year
Spring 2026
Language
English
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics
Department
Linguistics
First Advisor
Naoko Witzel
Second Advisor
Jeffrey Witzel
Third Advisor
Iya Price
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the role of vowelization diacritics in Arabic visual word recognition and their contribution to early stages of lexical processing. Across writing systems, diacritical marks differ in their functional role and in whether they are part of letter identity, raising fundamental questions about how such features are encoded during word recognition. Arabic provides a particularly informative testing ground for these questions: vowelization diacritics in this language carry rich phonological information yet are systematically absent from the texts that skilled readers encounter daily. This interaction between the linguistic value of vowelization and its near-total omission in naturalistic reading positions Arabic as a uniquely powerful lens through which to examine whether this type of diacritic modulates the earliest stages of visual word recognition, or whether their influence arises only downstream in lexical access.
Three masked priming lexical decision experiments were conducted to evaluate whether vowelization influences the early stages of lexical access. In Experiments 1 and 2, primes were presented in unvowelized, correctly vowelized, and incorrectly vowelized forms, while targets varied in their vowelization status. Experiment 3 extended this design to words lacking productive tri-consonantal roots in order to assess whether root-based morphological structure modulates vowelization effects. Across experiments, correctly and incorrectly vowelized primes yielded robust and comparable priming effects. That is, vowelization did not reliably modulate lexical activation, regardless of target vowelization or morphological structure.
These findings point to a consistent conclusion: vowelization diacritics do not exert a measurable influence during the earliest stages of Arabic visual word recognition. Although vowelization encodes important phonological information, this information does not appear to modulate lexical access under masked priming conditions. The results are interpreted in light of current models of diacritic processing, with particular attention to the role of reading experience in shaping which orthographic features achieve diagnostic status during the early stages of lexical access. The present findings delimit rather than dismiss the role of vowelization. That is, they establish that while vowelization diacritics do not influence the earliest stage of word recognition, they leave open the questions of when and under what conditions these diacritical marks affect language processing.
Keywords
Arabic reading, visual word recognition, masked priming, diacritic processing, orthographic processing, lexical access
Disciplines
Arabic Language and Literature | Arabic Studies | Language and Literacy Education | Reading and Language
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Alharbi, Maram, "Visual Word Recognition and the Role of Diacritics: Evidence from Arabic Vowelization." (2026). Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations. 2.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/linguistics_tesol_dissertations2/2
Included in
Arabic Language and Literature Commons, Arabic Studies Commons, Language and Literacy Education Commons, Reading and Language Commons