Analysis of Letter Representation Using Latin and Arabic Scripts: A Masked Priming Study

Abstract

Reading plays an essential role in our everyday lives. The aim of this study is to investigate how letters are represented in the brain using the unique characteristics of the Arabic language, which can be written with 2 different scripts. The hypothesis proposed is that the processing of script is sound based: Phonology is what determines letter identity. Using a forward-masked priming paradigm, we showed that Latin-script primes facilitated the recognition of subsequent Arabic-script targets which differed in orthography but shared phonology, thus suggesting a common level of phonological processing. In addition, semantic priming effects were controlled for. The findings thus confirmed our hypothesis and showed that letters that represent the same sound are processed similarly. © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.