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April 6, 2012
Why can’t Ghazi read?
Have trouble reading Arabic? It’s all in your brain.
DAVID ROSENBERG THE MEDIA LINE
Why can’t Ghazi read? The answer is he can, but because he has to contend with Arabic characters, it takes him longer than it does for Johnny to master English or for Yoni to gain proficiency in Hebrew. In fact, research shows that, odds are, if he were given the chance, Ghazi would learn to read Hebrew faster than his native tongue.
The fact that Arabic is harder to read than English, Hebrew and a lot of other languages is an established fact. Researchers at Israel’s University of Haifa set out to find out why and the answer, they believe, is that reading in English and Hebrew draws on both hemispheres of the brain while Arabic reading relies on the left hemisphere.
“The left hemisphere of an Arabic reader can do the task [of reading] by itself. The right hemisphere can help it, but the left hemisphere can also do it on its own,” Zohar Eviatar, one of the two researchers, told this reporter. “We didn’t find any evidence that the right hemisphere contributes anything to the process of word recognition.”
The two hemispheres of the brain control different types of activities. The right half specializes in processing spatial tasks and the holistic processing of messages, while the left side is responsible for processing verbal messages and local processing of messages. They communicate with each other through a thick band of 200-250 million nerve fibres called the corpus callosum.
With the left hemisphere doing all the work of reading Arabic, explained her colleague and co-researcher, Raphiq Ibrahim of the university’s Edmond J. Safra Brain Research Centre for the Study of Learning Disabilities, the cognitive burden becomes heavier, making it more difficult to read the language, even for someone who speaks it fluently.
Probing the idiosyncrasies of Arabic are important for helping children suffering dyslexia and other disabilities that impair the ability to read. These barriers have, of course, been studied extensively, but nearly all the work has been done with English and, more recently in Chinese, said Eviatar.
“Arabic is like English and Hebrew in that it’s an alphabetic writing system, but we don’t really know much about it,” she explained. “We make all these generalizations based on English. For example, the definition of dyslexia is based on the kind of mistakes children who learn English make.”
Some work, she noted, has been done in addressing the special problems of Hebrew readers, but almost nothing has been done in Arabic and it is schoolchildren who are paying the price.
“If you go to Arabic schools in Israel, for example, they learn to read Hebrew faster than Arabic,” Eviatar said. “In the Palestinian Authority, I have a friend whose son was in first grade, and he was angry that his son was learning English faster than Arabic. The bottom line is that Arabic orthography itself somehow doesn’t allow the involvement of the right hemisphere in the very early stages of reading.”
Eviatar, Ibrahim and others have been researching the challenges to reading Arabic for years. One study they conducted found that people had more trouble identifying Arabic letters than they did Hebrew or English ones. Another established that it was not because Arabic characters are usually joined together, but because the letters themselves are visually complex.
Hebrew letters are a variation on a square while English characters are quite distinct from one another. Arabic letters are, on the one hand, very similar to one another in many cases and, on the other hand, change in form, depending on their placement inside a word.
Eviatar is quick to note that, while the latest study, which was published in January in the journal Behavioral and Brain Functions, takes the work on Arabic reading further ahead, there is still a lot to do. The research did not examine how people actually read Arabic, English and Hebrew, but rather if they could recognize whether a string of characters was a real word or gibberish – in the space of one-fifth of a second.
That is too fast for an ordinary brain scan to capture, so Ibrahim and Eviatar looked to test their hypothesis about the left-right hemisphere connection by inference. They recruited 120 students at Haifa University from among Arabic and Hebrew speakers and supplemented with native English speakers from the university’s overseas program for two experiments.
In the first, the students were asked to figure out whether the letters in their native language flashed up on a computer screen formed a word or a string of letters with no meaning. In the second, they were given various words on the right or left side of the screen. The words were next shown on both sides of the screen. The target word was highlighted to show that it was the word they should identify while the other stimulus appeared on the other side of the screen to distract the brain processing.
The second test is what gave the researchers insight into the brain’s two hemispheres because the right side of the brain controls muscles on the left side of the body and the left side of the brain controls muscles on the right side of the body. Thus, when the proper or nonsense word was screened on the right side of the screen, it was processed by the left side of the brain and vice versa.
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