The Advantage of Morphological Awareness Among Normal and Dyslexic Native Arabic Readers: A Literature Review

Abstract

This article presents a review of studies that investigated the advantage of morphological awareness and knowledge of basic morphemes that comprise verbs in Arabic among normal and dyslexic native Arabic readers, and discusses the role of Arabic morphology in reading. The review included studies on Arabic as well as some studies on Hebrew, since they are both Semitic languages. Recent studies have demonstrated the importance of morphology in the organization of words, and its effect on the reading process. Studies investigating normal and dyslexic readers usually focused on the role of phonology in different orthographies, rather than on the role of morphology. It is important to study the orthography of the specific language, due to its specific nature, and the different effect that each orthography type may have on the reading process. The present review discusses most of the recent studies on Arabic morphology and focuses on the contribution of morphological awareness for acquisition and fluency in reading and its effect on the reading process of normal and dyslexic readers. The findings of these studies, as well as future research directions are discussed.

Highlights

1. What is already known about this topic? *Recent studies demonstrated the importance of morphology in the organization and processing of words and its effect on the reading process. This role is not clear in all orthographies.

2. What this paper adds. *The present review discusses most of the recent studies conducted on Arabic morphology, shows what these studies concluded as well as future research directions.