A tale of one letter: Morphological processing in early Arabic spelling

Abstract

The study examined spelling of the letter ت <t> in Arabic among first-, second-, third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade native Arabic-speaking children (N = 150). The letter <t> is among the most frequent letters in Arabic and it participates in the encoding of three productive morphological entities: root, word-pattern and affix. The letter <t> is also homographic and may represent the default voiceless dental-alveolar stop phoneme /t/ as well as its emphatic allophonic variant [ṭ] coinciding, hence, with the phoneme typically represented by the letter <ṭ> ط. The study tested whether children use morphological cues in spelling the letter <t> in Arabic, and whether morphological processing is different for different morphemes and in different grades. The results indicate that morphological processing is functional very early on in Arabic spelling among children. Yet, morphological processing appears to depend on the specific morpheme targeted, with some morphemes lending themselves more strongly to morphological processing than others. The results are discussed within the framework of the morphological and morpho-orthographic structure of Arabic.

Keywords:

• Arabic
• Affix
• Morphology
• Morphological awareness
• Morphological processing
• Root
• Spelling
• Word-pattern

Notes

¹ Interestingly, even loan words, such as talfizyo:n “television” and talifo:n “telephone”, which do not have an inherent Semitic root and word-pattern structure, are treated by speakers as having one, hence the words “talfaz” “he televised” and “talfan” is “he called”; using a backformation derivational process known as Root extraction.

² Dots/points are used in the Arabic orthography for phonetic distinction among letters and are an obligatory part of the letter.

³ Excluded from this are “weak” roots which contain a glide. Weak roots are prone to morpho-phonological shifting (For more, see Saiegh-Haddad & Henkin-Roitfarb, in press).

⁴ The spelling of the letter hamza, used to represent the glottal stop phoneme, is another main source of feed-forward opacity and spelling inaccuracy in Arabic. See Saiegh-Haddad & Henkin-Roitfarb (in press) for more details.

⁵ Velarisation spread is more predominant in the dialects. Yet, it is also strongly functional in Modern Standard Arabic with varying degrees depending on the speakers' spoken Arabic background.

⁶ Neither did earlier research in Arabic spelling address the role of the phonological distance in Arabic diglossia on the phonological errors observed in the spellings of school students (Saiegh-Haddad, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007). This factor has been shown to affect the use of phonological encoding mechanisms by Arabic L1 spelling in English L2 (Allaith & Joshi, 2011) and by Hebrew L1 spelling in Arabic L2 (Russak & Fragman, in press).

⁷ The root consonants mostly retain their phonemic identity in the derivational process and do not undergo phonological shift. Excluded from this are “weak verbs” (see Saiegh-Haddad and Henkin-Roitfarb, in press) which were not targeted in this study.