Department of Psychology, Zayed University, Dubai, UAE.
Department of Neuroscience, Psychology and Behaviour, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2022 Jan;84(1):10-24. doi: 10.3758/s13414-021-02375-1. Epub 2021 Oct 10.
Contextual predictability influences both the probability and duration of eye fixations on words when reading Latinate alphabetic scripts like English and German. However, it is unknown whether word predictability influences eye movements in reading similarly for Semitic languages like Arabic, which are alphabetic languages with very different visual and linguistic characteristics. Such knowledge is nevertheless important for establishing the generality of mechanisms of eye-movement control across different alphabetic writing systems. Accordingly, we investigated word predictability effects in Arabic in two eye-movement experiments. Both produced shorter fixation times for words with high compared to low predictability, consistent with previous findings. Predictability did not influence skipping probabilities for (four- to eight-letter) words of varying length and morphological complexity (Experiment 1). However, it did for short (three- to four-letter) words with simpler structures (Experiment 2). We suggest that word-skipping is reduced, and affected less by contextual predictability, in Arabic compared to Latinate alphabetic reading, because of specific orthographic and morphological characteristics of the Arabic script.
语境可预测性会影响阅读拉丁字母（如英语和德语）脚本时注视单词的概率和持续时间。然而，目前尚不清楚在阅读阿拉伯语等闪米特语时，单词的可预测性是否会对眼动产生同样的影响。阿拉伯语是一种具有非常不同视觉和语言特征的字母语言。因此，了解这些知识对于确定不同字母书写系统的眼动控制机制的普遍性非常重要。为此，我们在两项眼动实验中研究了阿拉伯语中的单词可预测性效应。这两项实验都发现，高可预测性单词的注视时间比低可预测性单词短，这与之前的发现一致。可预测性并不影响（四到八个字母）不同长度和形态复杂性的单词的跳过概率（实验 1）。然而，对于结构更简单的短单词（三到四个字母）则会影响跳过概率（实验 2）。我们认为，与拉丁字母阅读相比，阿拉伯语中的单词跳过减少，且受语境可预测性的影响较小，这是因为阿拉伯语书写系统具有特定的正字法和形态学特征。
