This study investigates the cognitive interplay between diacritization and lexical ambiguity in Arabic visual word recognition, examining how diacritization marks influence lexical recognition in Arabic deep orthography. Previous literature reported conflicting findings on the effect of diacritization on Arabic word recognition. Some studies suggest diacritization facilitates word recognition by disambiguating homographs, and others argue they impose visual complexity costs. This study systematically manipulates ambiguity (ambiguous vs. unambiguous words) and diacritization (diacritized vs. undiacritized forms) in a lexical decision task (LDT). Sixty native Arabic speakers participated in a counterbalanced within-subjects design, using two counterbalanced lists. The results suggest a diacritization cost, where diacritized words are slower than undiacritized words, thus supporting the visual complexity hypothesis. In addition, the results showed inconsistent ambiguity effect in the two lists. The current findings are discussed within the framework of the dual-route model. The implications of the current results on Arabic NLP are proposed.
Noha Fathy (Thu,) studied this question.