Literacy problems in Arabic: Sensitivity to diglossia in tasks involving working memory

Arab children acquire the Spoken Arabic – ammia (SA) – at home and are exposed to literary Arabic – fuṣḥa (so-called Modern Standard Arabic, MSA) – only at school age. This diglossia was found to affect reading acquisition in Arabic. The study was undertaken to determine whether a supra-lexical factor, in this research working memory, affects meta-lingual performance, which is critical for the development of reading skill in Arabic language readers; and whether this effect differs with age, from 1st through 12th grade of school. Short-term memory was found to be involved in and affect phonemic manipulations at all grade levels: the longer the manipulated stimulus, the poorer the performance. The finding is in line with the "transparency-by-modularity" interaction, and suggests that Arabic is a "semi-modular" language in contrast to highly modular Hebrew. A theory to account for acquisition of literary Arabic at an early age is proposed based on the study results and previous findings.