Diacritics as Key Predictors: Enhancing Word Recognition in Qurʾānic Texts Despite Contextual Constraints
Keywords:
Arabic reading, word recognition, diacritics, contextual disambiguation, Qur’ānic text, reading proficiency.Abstract
It is known that diacritics (ḥarakāt) are essential to reading Arabic but their importance for accurate recognition of words has not been fully understood across text types and levels of reader expertise. This mixed-methods study explores the role of diacritics in how readers at different stages of lexical development decode Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Qur’ānic passages across two phases. In the first phase, a total of forty-five native Arabic-speaking readers from three educational levels were presented with ten unpracticed, undiacritized MSA sentences. In the second phase, after recording accuracy, speed, and errors, the top fifteen participants read ten Qur’ānic verses selected for complexity of context and orthographic similarities. Both phases used homographs and complex sentences to examine whether word recognition could be predicted from context. A retrospective verbal protocol was also used to assess how diacritics and context affected reading accuracy. It is found that, in MSA texts, reliance on diacritics decreases but remains important when contextual cues are weak while, in Qur’ānic texts, diacritics strongly enhance word recognition because contextual cues are limited. These findings support a simple Arabic word disambiguation model, highlighting that accurate initial reading of classical texts, including non-memorized Qur’anic passages, relies heavily on diacritics regardless of the reader’s level of skill.
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