Edited by Dimitrios Ntelitheos and Tommi Tsz-Cheung Leung
[Studies in Arabic Linguistics 10] 2021
► pp. 109–122
This paper studies phonological awareness in Emirati Arabic by tracking eye movements. Thirty-eight Arabic participants, divided into feedback and no feedback groups, were evaluated on three phonological conditions: (1) explicit instructions for onset consonant matching, (2) implicit instructions for segmentation of initial consonant, and (3) rhyme matching. We hypothesized that (1) fixations would differ according to the phonological conditions, (2) subjects would perform better on explicit instructions compared to implicit instructions, (3) subjects would perform better in the two consonant conditions compared to the rhyme condition, and (4) feedback would improve performance. The experiment shows that accuracy on the consonant conditions was higher than in the rhyme condition. Fixation patterns differed between the consonant conditions and the rhyme condition, and this effect was dependent on the administration of feedback, suggesting that eye tracking can be used to evaluate phonological awareness in Emirati Arabic.