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In: Brain Research Journal ISSN: 1935-2875
Volume 2 Issue 4 ©2009 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.
NEUROCOGNITIVE ASPECTS OF PROCESSING ARABIC
AND HEBREW
Raphiq Ibrahim
Learning Disabilities Department, University of Haifa and Cognitive Neurology
Department, Rambam Medical Center, Haifa, Israel
ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to explore the neuro-cognitive basis of the difficulties that
the Arabic-Hebrew bilingual encounters in processing Arabic language as a result of the
diglossic situation in Arabic (Spoken Arabic and Modern Standard, or Literary Arabic).
Furthermore, the chapter discusses the unique features of Arabic language that might
contribute to the inhibition and slowness of reading acquisition and might even hinder the
acquisition of basic academic skills. In the first section, two case studies of a Arabic-
Hebrew aphasic patients (MH and MM) presented, with different disturbances in the two
languages, Arabic (L1) and Hebrew (L2). They exhibited a complementary pattern of
severe impairment of either L1 (Arabic) or L2 (Hebrew) constituting a double
dissociation. These results suggested that the principles governing the organization of
lexical representations in the brain are not similar for the two languages. The second
section focuses on the functional architecture of reading in Hebrew and in Arabic. The
effects of characteristics of Arabic and Hebrew as Semitic languages, on hemispheric
functioning were systematically examined. These patterns are compared with the modal
findings in the literature, which are usually based on English. Also, the effects of the
absence of almost all vowel information, the orthographies of the two languages, and
their non-concatenative morphological structure were investigated. It was shown that
when languages make different types of demands upon the cognitive system,
interhemispheric interaction is dynamic and is suited to these demands. In that regard
both Arabic and Hebrew require a higher level of interhemispheric interaction than does
English.
1. THE NEURAL BASIS OF BILINGUALISM
The question of how multiple languages are represented in the brain remains unresolved.
On one hand, data have shown that there is one neural representation of multiple languages
(Moretti, Bava, Torre, Antonello, Zorzon & Zivandinov, 2001; Paradis, 1990) and called "the
linguistic domain" approach. On the other hand, data have indicated that bilingual persons
could have distinct cortical language areas (Ojemann, Ojemann & Lettich,1989; Dehaene,
Dupoux, & Mehler 1997) and called by some researchers the ‘‘language-membership
Raphiq Ibrahim
2
principle’’ approach. According to this approach, first language (L1) and second language
(L2) representations would be, to some extent, sustained by different brain areas, since they
take different language membership values. Cases of selective aphasia and other results from
neuro-imaging techniques demonstrate dissociation between multiple language
representations in the cognitive system of the brain (Dehaene et al.1997). In their study in
French-English bilinguals using fMRI technique, Dehaene and his colleagues (1997) found
dissociation between cortical areas involved in French (L1) and English (L2) languages. The
regions of the left superior temporal sulcus, superior and middle temporal gyri showed
consistent activation across subjects during presentation of L1.
According to this Hypothesis a bilingual aphasic found to be recovered selectively in one
language while the other is lost (see Green, 2005; Green & Price, 2001). The classical model
assigns language functions to two regions in the left hemisphere, the inferior frontal region
and the temporo-parietal region of the brain. Injuries in the general boundaries of these
cortical areas have resulted in clinically and linguistically different aphasic syndromes,
referred to as Broca’s aphasia (agrammatic) and Wernicke’s aphasia (paragrammatic).
In recent years, most localization theory of language lost its categorical power. Some
researchers provided evidences for people whose language’s components (like semantics) are
localized in the right hemisphere (Fabbro, 2001; Fabbro, Pesenti, Facoetti, Bonanomi, Libera
& Lorusso, 2001). Additional evidence has come from epileptic bilingual patients that
performed a picture naming task in L1 and L2 while having different brain areas stimulated
(e.g, Lucas, McKhann, & Ojemann, 2004). Lucas and his colleagues suggested that both
overlapping and distinct brain regions are involved in the representations of multiple
languages of a bilingual. Furthermore, some studies of the activity of the brain has revealed
that the same brain regions are responsible for the representation of multiple languages of a
bilingual reglardless of the grade of similarity between these languages (Klein, Zatorre,
Milner & Meyer, 1994). On this view, the organization of the lexical representations of the
two languages (L1 and L2) would be governed by variables such as grammatical class and
semantic category regardless of language membership. Klein, Milner, Zatorre, Zhao, and
Nikelski (1999) compared cerebral organization of two typologically distant languages:
English and Mandarin Chinese. The subjects, proficient in both languages, had learned their
L2s during adolescence. Mandarin was chosen as it differs from English in its specified use of
pitch and tone. The study examined the influence of linguistic structure on cerebral blood
flow (CBF) patterns in subjects when they performed a noun-verb generation task. The task
conditions consisted of repeating nouns in Mandarin, repeating nouns in English, generating a
verb for a noun in Mandarin, and generating a verb for a noun in English. Overall, the pattern
of CBF increase seen in response to the L1 was strikingly similar to that seen for the L2. This
finding led to the conclusion that in fluent bilinguals who use both languages in daily life
lexical search utilizes common cortical areas. More recently, based on the results from an
event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (ER-fMRI) showed a shared neural
mechanism for the processing of native and second languages (Pu et al.2001). Moreover, Illes
and his colleagues (1999), examined brain activation in bilingual participants who
sequentially learned English and Spanish (or vice versa). The participants became fluent in
their L2s a decade after L1 acquisition but were proficient in both languages. Subjects were
presented with 480 concrete and abstract English nouns and their Spanish translations.
Participants performed tasks that required semantic and non-semantic decisions about those
words. The semantic activation for both languages occurred in the same cortical locations.
Neurocognitive Aspects of Processing Arabic and Hebrew
3
Further, no activation difference was observed in a direct comparison of semantic judgments
in English and Spanish. The researchers suggested that, according to the resolution provided
by functional MRI, a common neural system mediates semantic processes for the two
languages in the bilingual brain. They concluded that learning a new language after puberty
does not require the addition of a new semantic processing system or the recruitment of new
cortical regions.
A third hypothesis claimed that both "language membership" and "linguistic domain"
would affect the way L2 information is represented in the brain.
Concerning the issue of cognitive representation of the two languages in bilinguals,
several psycholinguistic models have been proposed. Current models of lexical access in
bilingual speakers typically assume that the semantic system is shared by the two languages
of a bilingual (De Bot, 1992; Green, 1986; 1998; Kroll and Stewart, 1994). In other words,
each semantic/conceptual representation is connected to its corresponding lexical nodes in the
two languages. Although, some researchers (e.g., Van Hell & De Groot, 1998) have claimed
that conceptual representations are language dependent, recent proposals widely favor the
idea that, at least for common words, bilingual subjects have a unique conceptual store shared
by both languages. If the semantic system is shared by the two languages of a bilingual, the
question arised was, if there is spreading activation between the semantic system and the
lexical system regardless of the language programmed for response. Another, question that
researchers tried to answer was whether the activation of the semantic system spread to the
two languages of a bilingual? Some researchers claimed that there is parallel activation of the
two languages of a bilingual regardless of the language chosen for production (De Bot, 1992;
Green, 1986). In other words, current models follow the general spreading activation
principle and assume that there is parallel activation of the two lexicons of a bilingual. Levelt
(1989) assumed that concepts are represented as indivisible nodes and the nodes
corresponding to a concept are linked to the nodes of semantically related concepts. For
example, the activation of the conceptual node corresponding to the picture (e.g., bird)
“spreads” some activation to other semantic representations that are associated with it (such
as tree, plane). Other models (Caramazza, 1997; Dell, 1986) assumed that concepts (e.g.
canary) are represented as a bundle of semantic features (bird, can fly, two legs) and the
activation of a given concept (e.g. bird) would activate part of the semantic representation of
other related concepts (e.g. penguin) because some of their semantic features are shared.
Regardless of the specific mechanisms, these two proposals share the assumption that in the
course of naming a picture, several semantic representations are activated to some degree.
This is either because semantic representations are interconnected or because they share
several semantic features.
In that regard, psycholinguistic models assumed that words of each language are
represented separately at the lexical level and connected indirectly via a common semantic
system, which is accessed independently from each lexicon (Chen & Leung, 1989;
Schwanenfeugel & Ray, 1986). In neuro-linguistic terms, these models suggest that separate
but overlapping regions are involved in the processing of more than one language.
Cases of bilingual aphasia afford an excellent opportunity to study language processes.
The pattern of aphasia following brain injury to a bilingual is very diverse and therefore
results obtained should be wearily approached. Previous studies showed that, a brain lesion
could selectively disrupt one language but not the other (Ojemann, 1983) and bilingual
persons could have distinct cortical language areas (Dehaene et al.1997). On the other hand,
Raphiq Ibrahim
4
there are numerous reports of aphasia simultaneously affecting both of a bilingual patients
languages following lesions of the left hemisphere suggesting that, both overlapping and
distinct brain regions are involved in the representations of multiple languages (Fabbro,
2001). A further complication to the resolution of this issue comes from the fact that the
cortical organization of L2 in relation to L1 seems to depend on various factors such as level
of proficiency, age of acquisition and exposure (e.g. Kim et al., 1997).
This conflicting data can be resolved with case studies selected bilingual aphasic patients
indicating dissociation and a double dissociation between first language (L2) and second
language (L1). However, researchers must keeps in mind that lesions in the brain are often
widespread.
In the first section of this chapter, I report the performance of two Arab-Hebrew
bilinguals who had suffered a brain lesions tumor and were undergone a surgery.
As a result of these brain lesions, the linguistic abilities were impaired and exhibited
different symptomologies in the both languages.
In one case, the patient (MH) is an Arabic-Hebrew bilingual who suffered from lesion to
the brain following brain tumor, evinced dissociation between his ability to perceive and
produce his second language (Hebrew). In the second case, another patient (MM) who
suffered a brain damage following hemorrhage evinced complementary picture with a double
dissociation to MH case report.
1.1. Arabic and Hebrew- Background and Characteristics
As Semitic languages, words in Arabic and Hebrew have similar morphological
structures. Regardless if these words based on inflectional or Derivational forms, the
morpheme-based lexicon of these families implies the existence of roots and templates (word
patterns?). Roots are recognized as autonomous morphemes expressing the basic meaning of
the word. Roots are abstract entities that are separated by vowels adding morphological
information (e.g., in Arabic, the perfective /a-a/ in daraba ‘hit’, or the passive /u-i/ in duriba
‘was hitten’ and in Hebrew , the perfective /a-a/ in lakah ‘took’, or the passive /ni-a/ in nilkah
‘was taken’). Other researchers defined both Semitic languages as non-concatenative, highly
productive derivational morphology (Berman, 1978). According to this approach, most words
are derived by embedding a root (generally trilateral) into a morpho-phonological word
pattern when various derivatives are formed by the addition of affixes and vowels. Also, in
Arabic and Hebrew, there are four letters which also specify long vowels, in addition to their
role in signifying specific consonants (in Arabic there are only three – a, u, y ). However,
in some cases it is difficult for the reader to determine whether these dual-function letters
represent a vowel or a consonant. When vowels do appear (in poetry, children's books and
liturgical texts), they are signified by diacritical marks above, below or within the body of the
word. Inclusion of these marks specifies the phonological form of the orthographic string,
making it completely transparent in terms of orthography/phonology relations.
In regard to semantics, the core meaning is conveyed by the root, while the phonological
pattern conveys word class information. For example, in Arabic the word (TAKREEM)
consists of the root (KRM, whose semantic space includes things having to do with respect)
and the phonological pattern TA—I. The combination results in the word ‘honor’. In Hebrew,
the word (SIFRA) consists of the root (SFR- whose semantic space includes things having to
Neurocognitive Aspects of Processing Arabic and Hebrew
5
do with counting) and the phonological pattern –I—A, which tends to occur in words
denoting singular feminine nouns, resulting in the word ‘numeral’. As the majority of written
materials do not include the diacritical marks, a single printed word is often not only
ambiguous between different lexical items (this ambiguity is normally solved by semantic and
syntactic processes in text comprehension), but also does not specify the phonological form of
the letter string. Thus in their unpointed form, Hebrew and Arabic orthographies contain a
limited amount of vowel information and include a large number of homographs. Comparing
to Hebrew, Arabic includes much larger number of homographs thus, it is much more
complicated than Hebrew.
Despite the similarity between these languages, there are major differences between
Arabic and Hebrew. First, Arabic has special case of diglossia that does not exist in Hebrew.
Literary Arabic is universally used in the Arab world for formal communication and is known
as “written Arabic” called also "Modern Standard Arabic" (MSA) and Spoken Arabic appears
partly or entirely in colloquial dialect and it is the language of everyday communication and
has no written form. Although sharing a limited subgroup of words, the two forms of Arabic
are phonologically, morphologically, and syntactically different. This added complexity is
found in several characteristics that occur in both orthographies, but to a much larger extent in
Arabic than in Hebrew. The later has to do with orthography that includes letters, diacritics
and dots. In the two orthographies some letters are represented by different shapes, depending
on their placement in the word. Again, this is much less extensive in Hebrew than in Arabic.
In Hebrew there are five letters that change shape when they are word final: ( ,
). In Arabic, 22 of the 28 letters in the alphabet have four shapes each (for example, the
phoneme /h/ is represented as: ). Thus, the grapheme-phoneme relations are
quite complex in Arabic, with similar graphemes representing quite different phonemes, and
different graphemes representing the same phoneme. Concerning dots in Hebrew, they occur
only as diacritics to mark vowels and as a stress-marking device (dagesh). In the case of three
letters, this stress-marking device (which does not appear in unvowelized scripts) changes the
phonemic representation of the letters from fricatives (v, x, f) to stops (b, k, p for the letters
respectively). In the unvowelized form of the script, these letters can be disambiguated by
their place in the word, as only word or syllable initial placement indicates the stop
consonant. In Arabic, the use of dots is more extensive: many letters have a similar or even
identical structure and are distinguished only on the basis of the existence, location and
number of dots (e.g., the Arabic letters representing /t/ and /n , ) become the
graphemes representing /th/ and /b/ ( , ) by adding or changing the number or location of
dots.
Many studies have demonstrated Bilinguals do not recognize written words exactly the
same as monolinguals. For example, it was proven that visual word identification in L2 is
affected by the native language of the reader (e.g., Wang, Koda, & Perfetti, 2003). However,
the opposite is true as well: knowledge of L2 may have impact on the identification of printed
L1 words was published by Bijeljac-Babic, Biardeau, and Grainger (1997). In comparative
studies of different languages, there are two points of comparison: The speech and the writing
system. Thus, in comparing Arabic and Hebrew reading, we compare examples of two related
language families (semetic languages) that are similar in their morphological structure but
radically differ in their orthographic and phonetic systems. Recent studies on Hebrew (Frost,
Deutsch & Forster, 1997) and Arabic (Mahadin, 1982.) support the assumption that roots can
Raphiq Ibrahim
6
be accessed as independent morphological units. Also, in the area of speech perception,
differences in the phonetic perception of L1 and L2 was found between native (for reviews
see Flege, 1992) and nonnative speakers (Eviatar, Leikin, & Ibrahim, 1999).
1.2. Case Report - M.H
M.H was a 41-year-old, right-handed male native speaker of Arabic (Ibrahim, 2008). He
was born in Israel and acquired Hebrew language at 4th grade and his Hebrew competence
was very high (a high school teacher). He was was brought to the hospital with sudden onset
of fever and confusion and diagnosed as suffering Herpes simplex virus. In the 5th day in the
hospital he was exhibited sudden high-grade of headache, vomiting and disturbance of
consciousness. Radiological findings showed acute, massive intracranial hemorrhage in the
left temporal lobe, compressing the central line of the brain contra-laterally and moderate
hemorrhage and encephalomyelitis in left temporal lobe and right frontal subdural
hemorrhage. After surgery he was sent to rehabilitation and for two months he was
hospitalized. During this period he developed an acute onset of a neurological deficit,
epileptic status with left temporal focus and exhibited Amnestic aphasia and his spontaneous
language production was non-fluent, with grammatical disruptions and common anomic
states. MH was administered neuropsychological tests after the rehabilitation period and
dissociation between the performance in the two languages was obtained. In Arabic MH
exhibited almost fluent speech with exhibited word-finding pauses and paraphasic errors and
with limited disturbances in auditory comprehension. In contrast, more disturbances appeared
in Hebrew, which constitute a second language. In the written language, MH has countered
problems in reading and writing compared to Arabic. MH exhibited non-fluent speech with
anomia, disturbances in auditory comprehension without difficulties in repetition. The results
revealed different patterns emerged in both languages, though they were more severe in
Hebrew. In addition, some preserved abilities were observed in single-word reading and some
writing to dictation in Hebrew. MH received intensive language therapy in Arabic and in
Hebrew for 3 months and showed significant improvement in both languages, more in Arabic.
The improvement in Arabic was in all linguistic abilities but in Hebrew a mild improvement
was noticed in his spontaneous speech and auditory comprehension, whereas naming ability
remained without changes. His speech in Arabic is fluent and grammatically correct but with
occasional paraphasias and prominent word-finding difficulties. His reading and writing
abilities improved significantly only in Arabic. MH’s naming abilities were impaired in all
modalities and in all types of naming tasks. However, these deficits were not equivalent in the
two languages, where Arabic was more productive. Phonemic priming was effective and
MH’s performance improved if he received more than one syllable. With treatment, a
significant improvement of auditory comprehension (including single-word comprehension)
was gradually appeared. To rule out symptoms due to right frontal hemorrhage, tasks
assessing visusopatial and frontal difficulties were conducted. The patient demonstrated good
visual ability. MH demonstrated good copying and construction abilities and the non-verbal
abstraction was near to his age norms, consistent with intact visual perception and reasoning
skills. In regard to phonologica abilities, Performance of MH was was dependent on word
length, with better performance on short words (three to five letters). Both Arabic and
Hebrew are languages with deep orthography where there is no one-to-one correspondence
Neurocognitive Aspects of Processing Arabic and Hebrew
7
between letters and sounds because most Arabic and Hebrew vowels are not instantiated as
letters. This is probably reflected in his relatively similar performance in both languages. In
Reading and Writing, MH’s read aloud single and short words using a direct visual strategy
but in some cases this strategy was not successful and he turned to letter-by-letter reading,
resulting in literal. His strategy for reading in Hebrew was similar, but resulted in poor
performance. Spontaneous writing (in Arabic) was in good level single words and word
combinations without literal paragraphias. In Hebrew, writing to dictation was possible only
at the level of words with literal paragraphias (for example, the word mapa, “map,” was
written as maba, which does not constitute a word. Overall, the patient MH displayed
somewhat different symptomatologies in his two languages. The results of the standard
examination showed that MH suffered from different language impairment in Arabic and
Hebrew, with a significantly more prominent disorder in Hebrew. Moreover, he displayed
different progress in both languages in consequence of language therapy, though progress in
Arabic was greater. This clinical picture is of interest because Arabic is structurally not very
distant from Hebrew (especially in terms of morphology and syntax). It is important to
remind that, although Arabic is the native language, the prior level of language competence in
the two languages was almost equivalent.
1.3. Case Report - M.H
This case report verified the existence of a double first language (L1)/second language
(L2) dissociation (Ibrahim, 2008). Arabic-Hebrew bilingual (MM), with similar cultural
background which who acquired Hebrew at age eight and considered to be balanced Arabic-
Hebrew bilingual (A retired Israeli army soldier) suffered from brain damage following a left
hemisphere tumor (oligodendroglioma) and craniotomy. MM was undergone surgery and a
left frontal craniotomy was carried out. After surgery, the patient was sent to a rehabilitation
period and was hospitalized for two months. During this period he developed Epileptic and
was treated with anti-convulsions drugs. In addition, because of the motor Aphasia, he was
undergone speech therapy for a long period. After his recovery, the same material were used
and a series of linguistic tasks taken from Western Aphasia Battery (WAB; Kertesz, 1982)
and the Boston Naming Test (BNT; Kaplan, Goodglass, & Weintraub, 1983) was
administered in Arabic and Hebrew to evaluate MM's efficiency of different components of
his linguistic processing system including: fluency, repetition, naming, spelling, category and
letter generation and other visuospatial tasks.
The results revealed dissociation between the performance in the two languages was
obtained. In Hebrew MM exhibited mild disturbances. The speech is grammatically correct
but with occasional literal and semantic paraphasias and slight word-finding difficulties
without disturbances in auditory comprehension and without difficulties in repetition. In
contrast, more disturbances were appeared in Arabic, his native language. As mentioned
before, MM exhibited non fluent speech in Arabic with prominent word finding difficulties,
disturbances in auditory comprehension and with mild difficulties in repetition. In naming,
literal and semantic paragraphias were exhibited in Arabic (for example in the literal
paraphasia, the word noor, “flower” was replaced by nowara, which is not word and in
semantic paraphasia in Hebrew for example, the word mihoga, “lead compasses” was
replaced by "igol “, which mean “sircle”. In the written language, MM countered problems in
Raphiq Ibrahim
8
reading and writing more in Arabic. Different patterns emerged in both languages, though
they were more severe in Arabic, the native language. However, in Arabic, some preserved
abilities were observed in single-word reading and some writing to dictation. MM’s most
evident initial as well as residual aphasic symptom was a marked difficulty in confrontation
naming in both languages. Initially (at least two years after surgery), MM demonstrated an
almost typical pattern of severe motor aphasia in both languages (Benson, 1979; Luria, 1975).
MM’s naming abilities were impaired in all modalities and in all types of naming tasks.
However, these deficits were not equivalent in the two languages, where Hebrew was more
productive. In regard to visual abilities
MM demonstrated good visual ability. However, he demonstrated moderate copying
difficulties and construction abilities (Clock drawing) and his score was consistent with his
intact visual perception. The non verbal abstraction on the Wisconsin Sorting Cards (WCST)
was below his age norms (reached on category) and he exhibited preservative reactions
leading to disorders in reasoning skills (Milner, 1963).
In regard to Phonological abilities, MM was presented with three auditory tasks
following Luria (1970): (a) counting the number of letters in individual words (i.e., saying
how many letters there are in a spoken word), (b) counting the numbers of syllables in an
individual word, and (c) synthesizing words from individually pronounced letters (i.e.,
recognizing an auditorally spelled word). The performance of MM was dependent on word
length, with better performance on short words (three to five letters). Concerning Reading
and Writing, reading aloud in Arabic revealed a letter-by-letter strategy and exhibited poor
performance in this language compared to Hebrew. The spontaneous writing in Hebrew was
in better level than Arabic in all types of words (single words and word combinations). In
Arabic, writing to dictation was possible only at the level of single words. The whole results
of the standard examination showed that MM suffered from different language impairment in
Arabic and Hebrew, with a significantly more prominent disorder in Hebrew. The initial
diagnosis was that MM suffering from amnestic aphasia. During the period of the language
treatment, MM was administered various tests to investigate further the nature of his
impairments in the two languages. Moreover, he displayed parallel progress in both languages
in consequence of language therapy, though progress in Arabic was greater. This clinical
picture is of interest because Arabic is structurally not very distant from Hebrew (especially
in terms of morphology and syntax). It is important to remind that, although Arabic is the
native language, the prior level of language competence in the two languages was almost
equivalent. The pattern of the results is complementary to the recent case study of MH
(Ibrahim, submitted) that exhibited dissociation between languages.
Given that MM residual left brain damage, evinced more deficits in L1 perception and
production than L2 (which differs in from native language), and given that in recent case
report, MH provided a dissociation between processing L1 and L2, the data support the
position that distinct brain regions are involved in the representations of multiple languages of
a bilingual. This support the conclusion that patient with a more prominent L1 impairment
usually have lesion centered on the left hemisphere areas, while a more prominent L2
impairment are observed in patient with damage limited to right hemispheres areas. Also, the
cases of MH and MM, both native Arab speakers who acquired Hebrew (both Semetic
languages), join experimental data in neurolinguistics and shed light on the relationship
between language and mechanisms of neurobiology, and offer new psycholinguistic evidence
to understand the dynamics of processing two languages in bilingual. In that regard, these
Neurocognitive Aspects of Processing Arabic and Hebrew
9
both findings are also compatible with a cognitive study gained in our lab (see, Ibrahim,
Aharon-Peretz, 2005). In that study, the response times (RTs) to target words in Arabic was
not influenced by a previous appearance of its translation equivalent in Hebrew. These
findings suggest that the lexical representations of Arabic and Hebrew words are equivalent,
both reflecting the typical organization of L2 in a separate lexicon (Gerard & Scarborough,
1989). This finding converges with other reports established in cross-lingual semantic
priming (de Groot & Nas, 1991), and repetition priming (de Groot & Nas, 1991). These
findings indicated a possible relationship between the two L1 and L2 via the semantic level.
This formulation fits the Hybrid Model of lexical representation in the bilingual brain (de Bot,
1992; de Groot, 1992). According to this model, a common semantic system is connected to
two independent lexical systems corresponding to each of the two languages known by the
bilingual. The ease of access to each lexicon from semantic memory depends on such factors
as the age at which the lexical item was acquired and the frequency and recency of access
(Snodgrass & Tsivkin, 1995). This will create a preference for choosing the native lexical
item, particularly in the presence of aphasic disturbances. MM demonstrated such preference
for Arabic in all the naming tasks. MM’s perception deficits suggest that bilinguals may
possess two separate switching mechanisms: a lexical/semantic mechanism. MM provides
evidence for that Hebrew as a second language, have a subsystem that is independent from
Arabic and that this subsystem was more fragile, and, therefore, more sensitive to brain
damage.
In the following chapter I will present the relationship between language structures (like
orthography and morphological structures) and the performance asymmetries of hemispheric
functioning.
2. HIGHER COGNITIVE FUNCTIONS IN PROCESSING
ARABIC AND HEBREW
An important part of the literacy problem is posed by the Arabic orthographic system and
its failure to support easy and efficient reading. Previous research on reading acquisition in
the Arabic language has revealed that this process is slower than in Hebrew (Abu-Rabia,
1997; Saiegh-Haddad, 2003). The next section focuses on the hardship of letter and word
discrimination in both beginning and skilled readers..
2.1. Orthographic Complexity
Although Arab childrens' scores on tests of phonological awareness were higher than
those of monolingual Hebrew speakers, their scores on tests of reading achievement were
lower (Eviatar & Ibrahim, 2001; Ibrahim, Eviatar, & Aharon-Perez, 2007). We suggested that
this is due to the complexity of Arabic orthography as compared with Hebrew orthography.
We tested the hypothesis that the graphemic complexity of Arabic is larger than in Hebrew,
and that this results in additional perceptual load (Ibrahim, Aharon-Peretz & Eviatar, 2002).
The subjects tested were all adolescent healthy native Arabic speakers who had mastered
Hebrew as a second language. We used oral and visual variants of the trail making test
Raphiq Ibrahim
10
(Reitan & Wolfson, 1985) in both languages. Both versions have two levels of complexity:
Level A requires connecting visually numbers or letters in order. Level B in the two
modalities requires alternation between letters and numbers. Level B in the oral version
requires declamation of the alternation. Performance time was the dependent variable. At the
low level of complexity (Level A) there were no differences between performance in Hebrew
and in Arabic in either the oral and the visual versions. In the more complex version (Level
B), language (Hebrew or Arabic) did not affect speed in the oral version, but in the visual
version, Arabic was performed significantly slower than Hebrew. These findings supported
our major conclusion that Arabic letters are harder to identify than Hebrew letters as a result
of their greater visual complexity.
In two divided visual field studies we have shown that Arabic letters are harder to
identify that English and Hebrew letters and have suggested that the locus of this difficulty is
in the right hemisphere. In the first study (Eviatar & Ibrahim, 2004) we examined directly the
effects of grapheme–phoneme conversion in English, Hebrew and Arabic, using a lateralized
nonsense syllable identification task. The syllables were constructed as consonant–vowel–
consonant (CVC) trigrams (the vowels in Hebrew and Arabic were letters that double as
consonants or vowels), and the task of the participants was to identify the three letters. The
stimuli were presented vertically in three conditions: left visual field (LVF), right visual field
(RVF), and bilaterally (BVF). The participants were university students, native readers of
each of the languages. In this study we were interested in errors, so we titrated exposure
duration independently for each participant, in order to achieve a duration that resulted in
50% errors. This paradigm allowed us to measure three dependent measures that indexed
different aspects of the task. The first measure was the mean exposure duration that was
reached in each of the three groups of participants in order to achieve a 50% error rate. This is
an index of the speed at which native readers can identify letters in each of the languages.
This measure revealed that the Arabic readers required significantly longer exposure
durations that the readers of Hebrew and English, and that Hebrew readers required
significantly longer exposure durations that the readers of English. Thus, these results suggest
that English letters are easier to identify that Hebrew letters, and that Arabic letters are the
hardest to identify. The second measure in this study was the total number of errors in each
presentation condition (LVF, RVF, and BVF). This measure revealed that all of the
participants showed a right visual field advantage (RVFA) that reflects specialization of the
LH for this linguistic task. This advantage, the difference between performance levels in the
LVF and in the RVF was significantly larger in the Arabic speakers than in the other groups,
as a result of poorer performance in the LVF in Arabic than in the other languages, while
performance in the other presentation conditions (RVF, BVF) was equivalent among the
groups. The third measure in this study was the difference between errors on the first letter
and errors on the last letter of the trigram, a qualitative measure of sequential processing
(Levy, Heller, Banich, & Burton, 1983; Eviatar, Hellige, & Zaidel, 1997). This qualitative
measure revealed that Arabic and Hebrew speakers evinced a similar pattern that was
different from the one shown by the English speakers. Of importance to us here is that it took
longer for Arabic speakers to identify Arabic letters than it did for Hebrew speakers to
identify Hebrew letters or English speakers to identify English letters. In addition, the large
difference between performance levels in the two visual fields of Arabic speakers suggested
that there are large differences in the abilities of the hemispheres in letter identification in
Arabic, but not in the other languages.
Neurocognitive Aspects of Processing Arabic and Hebrew
11
In divided visual field study we (Eviatar, Ibrahim, & Ganayim, 2004) explored the locus
of this difference, and showed that adult native Arabic speakers who can read both Arabic and
Hebrew, are better at identifying letters in Hebrew than in Arabic, and that the main
disadvantage for Arabic letters is in the left visual field, when they are exposed to the right
hemisphere (RH). We asked native Arabic speakers and native Hebrew speakers to perform a
lateralized letter matching task in both Arabic and Hebrew, using a physical identity criterion
(the Arabic speakers were literate in both languages, but the Hebrew speakers could not read
Arabic, and thus performed the task as a pattern matching task). The pattern of results in
response times was as we expected, revealing a RVFA in all of the conditions in which the
participants could read (all except Hebrew speakers in Arabic, who showed a slight LVFA in
this condition). The results of the accuracy measure were quite dramatic. In Hebrew, both
groups revealed low error rates and equivalent performance in the two visual fields (both
hemispheres are able to match letters quite well). In Arabic, the Hebrew speakers made many
errors, with equivalent performance in the two visual fields. Arabic speakers revealed good
performance in the RVF (their LH was able to match letters in Arabic as well as in Hebrew).
In the LVF, however, Arabic speakers made as many errors as Hebrew speakers (who cannot
read the language)! We hypothesized that the reason for this RH disadvantage in letter
recognition is the complexity of grapheme-phoneme relations in Arabic. In order to examine
our hypothesis that the RH cannot differentiate between very similar different letters in
Arabic, whereas the LH can do so, we created a global-local task with two types of
incongruent stimuli: one where the two letters on the two levels of the hierarchical stimulus
were physically very different from each other: and ; and another where the two letters
were very similar to each other: and . Participants were required to attend to the local or
the global levels of these hierarchical stimuli in different blocks. We measured the difference
between congruent (where the same letter was used on both levels of the stimuli) versus
incongruent conditions (where the letter in the global level was made out of small versions of
the other letter). This difference indicated the degree of interference between the levels. In the
first condition, where the letters were very different from each other, we replicated the results
of other studies in other languages (e.g. Lamb, Robertson, & Knight, 1990). We found a
global precedence (responses to the global level were always faster than to the local level
(Navon 1977), and an asymmetry in the degree of interference between the two visual fields:
stronger interference from the global level to the local level in the LVF, and the opposite
pattern in the RVF. This pattern has been used to support the hypothesis that the LH is
relatively more sensitive to the local aspects of visual stimuli and that the RH is relatively
more sensitive to the global aspects of these stimuli. Most interestingly, however, in the
second condition, where the two letters differed only in the number and placement of dots,
there was no incongruence effect in the LVF at all, while congruent stimuli were faster than
incongruent stimuli in the RVF in the local conditions. These results show that the RH cannot
discriminate between letters that differ only in the placement or number of dots (e.g. /t/- ت
and /b ب / ), but that the LH can do so.
Raphiq Ibrahim
12
2.2. Word Morphology
Arabic and Hebrew, as Semitic languages, are constructed by combining a consonantal
root (that carries most of the semantic information) and a word pattern that includes vowels as
well as consonants, and provides information about the word class and its morphological
status. Roman and Pavard (1987) used oculomotor recording techniques to evaluate visual
scanning strategies. They found that although mean reading time did not differ between
Arabic and French texts (note that for conveying identical content, the number of words
needed in Arabic is less than in French because Arabic morphology is more dense), gaze
duration per word was significantly longer in Arabic (342 ms) than in French (215 ms). This
phenomenon also has been found in comparisons of Hebrew and English text reading, in
which the morphology of Hebrew is dense and similar to that of Arabic, and English
morphology is concatenative and more similar to French (Shimron & Sivan, 1994).
A number of psycholinguistic studies (Feldman et al., 1995; Frost et al., 1997; Deutsch,
Frost, & Forster, 1998; Berent, 2002) have explored the effects of the morphology and
orthography of Hebrew on lexical access and the structure of the mental lexicon. One of the
conclusions from these studies is that the nonconcatenative and agglutinative morphological
structure of Hebrew, together with the distributional properties of abstract word forms, results
in the inclusion of subword morphological units in the mental lexicon of Hebrew speakers.
Similarly, Prunet, Beland, and Idrissi (2000) report a case study of an Arabic-French
agrammatic patient, who showed identical deficits in the two languages, except for a specific
type of error, metathesis, in which he modified the order of the root consonants, with the
vowel patterns remaining intact, only in Arabic, not in French. They interpret this finding as
reflecting the manner in which words are stored in the mental lexicon in the two languages:
whole words plus affixes in French, and roots plus word patterns in Arabic.
These findings converge with the conclusions of Eviatar (1999, Experiment 4) and
Eviatar and Ibrahim (2004), who showed that nonsense CVC trigrams are processed
sequentially in both visual fields in English, but in neither visual field in Hebrew and in
Arabic, and hypothesized that this is because Hebrew and Arabic nonwords cannot be read
sequentially. A similar conclusion for words was reached by Farid and Grainger (1996), who
showed that initial fixation position in a word results in somewhat different response patterns
in French and in Arabic. In French, fixation slightly to the left of the word's center results in
best recognition for both prefixed and suffixed words, while in Arabic, prefixed words result
in best recognition from leftward fixations and suffixed words result in best recognition from
rightward initial fixations. They suggest that this is due to the greater importance of
morphological structure in Arabic, because "...much of the phonological representation of the
word can be recovered only after successfully matching the consonant cluster to a lexical
representation" (p.364), that is, after extraction of the root. Berent (2002) has also concluded
that in Hebrew, “Speakers decompose the root from the word pattern in on-line word
identification…” (p. 335).
Most recently we reported that the different manner in which words are constructed in
English and in Hebrew and Arabic has an effect on the division of labor between the cerebral
hemispheres in a lateralized lexical decision task (Eviatar & Ibrahim, 2007). We presented
native speakers of Arabic, Hebrew, and English with morphologically simple and complex
words and nonwords in their native language, and measured indexes of hemispheric
integration. Morphological complexity was operationalized differently in English than in the
Neurocognitive Aspects of Processing Arabic and Hebrew
13
Semitic languages. In English we defined monomorphemic words as morphologically simple,
and derivations (e.g., farmer=farm+er) as morphologically complex. Morphologically
complex nonwords were made up of legal morphemes in illegal combinations (e.g., logly). In
Arabic and in Hebrew we defined a word as morphologically simple if the root+wordform
structure was not transparent (e.g., the word is not easily divisible into these morphemes or
the root is not generative, and appears only in that form), and as morphologically complex if
it was easily and transparently divisible into these elements. Morphologically complex
nonwords were created by inserting nonexistent roots into legal wordforms.
In English, we replicated the findings of previous studies: similarly to Iacoboni and
Zaidel (1996), we showed that while the RH is able to independently recognize nonwords; it
draws upon resources of the LH when encountering words. Similarly to Burgess and Skodis
(1993) in English, and to Koenig, Wetzel, and Carramazza (1992) in French, we showed that
for the English speakers, only the LH was sensitive to the morphological complexity of the
stimuli. Morphological complexity affected words and nonwords in the same manner, with
complex stimuli requiring longer latencies to be identified either as a word or as a nonwords
only in the RVF.
As opposed to the English speakers, both groups of speakers of the Semitic languages
showed bilateral sensitivity to morphological complexity. In addition, the Arabic and Hebrew
readers showed higher values on our indexes of interhemispheric integration, suggesting more
intensive hemispheric cooperation during the reading of Hebrew and Arabic than of English.
Interestingly, in both languages, morphological complexity had opposing effects for words
and for nonwords. Morphological complexity, or transparency of the root+wordform
structure, facilitated the recognition of words and decelerated the rejection of nonwords.
We suggested that the nonconcatenative morphology of the Semitic languages, in which
words are analyzed into their root and word-form constituents, requires that both hemispheres
be sensitive to morphological structure. The automatic analysis of a character string into a
recognizable word-form and a root resulted in faster recognition of complex words than of the
simple words, which are not divisible in this way. This analysis also resulted in slower
responses to complex nonwords than to simple nonwords, which did not contain a
recognizable word form. Thus, the word form made complex nonwords more 'wordlike',
requiring a more intensive search before they could be correctly rejected in the lexical
decision task.
In general, we found that the manner in which words are formed in these different
languages resulted in different types of interhemispheric division of labor in the lexical
decision task. Specifically, we showed that when languages make different types of demands
upon the cognitive system, interhemispheric interaction is dynamic and is suited to these
demands. Arabic and Hebrew require a higher level of interhemispheric interaction than does
English.
2.3. Reading in the Nonnative Language
Recently we have examined the interaction of the effects of reading Arabic and other
languages (Ibrahim & Eviatar, 2008). We took advantage of the high facility of Arab
university students in Hebrew and English, in order to examine the manner in which such
multilingual brains deal with word morphology. We used the same paradigm described above,
Raphiq Ibrahim
14
with trilingual Arab participants making lexical decisions on morphologically simple and
complex words and nonwords, in Arabic, in Hebrew, and in English. One of the interesting
results from this study is that in the RVF/LH there was a significant difference between
performance levels in the three languages, reflecting significantly better performance in
Arabic, which these participants learned to read first, than in Hebrew and English, which
these participants consider their nonnative languages. However, in the LVF/RH, there was no
difference between performance levels in the three languages. We interpret this as reflecting
the specific RH deficit in reading Arabic, which lowers performance in the LVF for this
language, such that it is not better than the second and third languages, in which these
participants have lower facility.
Another interesting result from this study is that the participants showed the same
patterns of interhemispheric cooperation in the three languages, suggesting that they used the
same reading strategies in all of the languages. For Hebrew, the patterns are similar to the
ones shown by native Hebrew speakers, suggesting that morphological processes are similar
in these similar languages. However, the patterns shown by native Arabic speakers in English
are different from the patterns shown by native English speakers. Thus, our participants were
reading a second (or third) language with the same mechanisms as the first learned language.
This type of pattern was also reported by Eviater (1999) for native Hebrew readers
recognizing nonsense syllables in English. Eviater (1999) suggested that this is due to the
demand for morphological decomposition in Hebrew that determines reading strategies for
other languages as well. The results reported here suggest that these same demands occur for
Arabic readers.
3. CONCLUSION
The whole findings of our group studies related to Arabic language in addition to findings
of other researchers (see. (Abu-Rabia, 1997; Saiegh-Haddad, 2003), support the notion that
Arabic has unique features that contribute to the inhibition and slowness of the reading
process. Furthermore, the chapter argued for inclusion of the neurofunctional perspective as a
comprehensive basis for the discussion of the organization of two languages in the cognitive
system of Arabic-Hebrew bilingual and how we should treat teaching Hebrew as second
language (L2). It was also suggested that bilinguals may possess two separate switching
mechanisms: a lexical/semantic mechanism. In that regard, the data provided evidence for
that Hebrew as a second language, have a subsystem that is independent from Arabic and that
this subsystem was more fragile, and, therefore, more sensitive to brain damage.
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