Awadh Faris H R, Zoubrinetzky Rachel, Zaher Ahmed, Valdois Sylviane
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts, Al-Qadisiyah University, Al Diwaniya, Iraq.
Center Référent des Troubles du Langage et des Apprentissages, Pôle Couple-Enfant, Center Hospitalier Universitaire, Grenoble, France.
Front Psychol. 2022 Nov 22;13:868530. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.868530. eCollection 2022.
Visual attention span is a measure of multielement parallel processing. Individuals with higher visual attention span are expected to allocate more attention to letters within strings, which boosts letter identification and translates into more efficient reading. Given the high visual complexity of the Arabic writing system, we expected visual attention span to be an important predictor of reading in the Arabic language.
Native Arabic readers from Grade 4 and Grade 5 were recruited in Iraqi schools. We assessed the contribution of visual attention span to their reading fluency performance in tasks of fully vowelized word and pseudo-word reading, non-vowelized text reading, and written text comprehension. Their phonological awareness, IQ, and single letter processing speed were further evaluated.
Results showed that visual attention span was a significant unique predictor of all the reading measures. Visual attention span and phonological awareness accounted for a similar amount of variance in word and pseudo-word reading fluency. Visual attention span was a far higher predictor than phonological awareness for text reading fluency and the sole predictor of text comprehension.
The role of visual attention span to reading is discussed by reference to current word recognition models. Higher involvement of visual attention is expected in vowelized script to compensate for increased crowding in the presence of diacritics. Visual attention would thus contribute to sub-lexical orthographic parsing and favor orthography-to-phonology mapping, in particular for the pseudo-words that do not benefit from efficient lexical feedback. In non-vowelized script, higher visual attention would enhance the accurate and fast identification of root letters within words, thus resulting in faster word recognition.
视觉注意广度是多元素并行处理的一种度量。视觉注意广度较高的个体预计会将更多注意力分配到字符串中的字母上，这有助于提高字母识别能力，并转化为更高效的阅读。鉴于阿拉伯书写系统的视觉复杂性较高，我们预计视觉注意广度是阿拉伯语阅读的一个重要预测指标。
在伊拉克学校招募了四年级和五年级的以阿拉伯语为母语的读者。我们评估了视觉注意广度对他们在全元音化单词和假词阅读、非元音化文本阅读以及书面文本理解任务中的阅读流畅性表现的贡献。进一步评估了他们的语音意识、智商和单个字母处理速度。
结果表明，视觉注意广度是所有阅读指标的一个显著独特预测指标。视觉注意广度和语音意识在单词和假词阅读流畅性方面解释的方差量相似。对于文本阅读流畅性，视觉注意广度的预测能力远高于语音意识，并且是文本理解的唯一预测指标。
通过参考当前的单词识别模型讨论了视觉注意广度对阅读的作用。预计在元音化文字中视觉注意的参与度更高，以补偿在有变音符时增加的拥挤感。因此，视觉注意将有助于次词汇正字法解析，并有利于正字法到语音的映射，特别是对于那些无法从有效的词汇反馈中受益的假词。在非元音化文字中，更高的视觉注意将提高对单词中词根字母的准确快速识别，从而实现更快的单词识别。
