Handbook of Arabic Literacy: Insights and Perspectives eds. by Elinor Saiegh-Haddad and R. Malatesha Joshi (review)

The impressive collection of eighteen articles that make up the Handbook of Arabic Literacyis divided into six sections: "The Arabic Language," "Arabic Lexical Representation and Processing," "Arabic Reading and Spelling Development and Disorders," "Arabic Diglossia: Language and Literacy," "Arabic Emergent Literacy: Socio-Cultural Factors," and "Arabic Literacy Development in Special Populations."

The first section, a single article by Elinor Saiegh-Haddad and Roni Henkin-Roitfarb, outlines the phonology, phonotactics, morphology, morphosyntax, and syntax of the written language, focusing on their consequences for orthographic practices and reading. It likewise introduces the notions of diglossia, differences between what anglophones term Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), differences between literary and spoken varieties of Arabic, and the representation of spoken varieties of Arabic, concluding with a discussion of the opacity of the Arabic script, even when vocalized, a theme explicated in later chapters. While necessary background for anyone not familiar with Arabic, this chapter provides an important, focused backdrop for the remaining chapters.

The second section comprises three empirical studies of the nature of lexical representation and the processing of written Arabic. Sami Boudelaa examines two competing models of the Arabic lexicon in light of existing research from cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and cognitive neuroscience, offering an obligatory morphological decomposition account of the structure of Semitic lexicons. Gunna Funder Hansen compares and contrasts current knowledge about word-recognition processes—letter and word-recognition systems—in Arabic (and to some extent Hebrew) as they contrast with those in European languages, especially English. Hansen contends that "reading in Arabic generally seems to be a more complex matter than reading in European languages" (71), citing the complexity of the script as well as the fact that Arabic words often contain a great deal of morphological information that has to be distinguished during decoding. Zohar Eviatar and Raphiq Ibrahim use evidence from psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics to account for why research repeatedly demonstrates that reading single words and reading acquisition generally are slower in Arabic than in other languages, focusing on the interaction of aspects of diglossia and Arabic orthography, specifically orthographic depth and the complexity of the letters themselves. Particularly intriguing is the discussion of evidence for the differential involvement of the visual fields in the two cerebral hemispheres, leading the authors to conclude that interaction between aspects of diglossia and the language's orthography results in readers developing a "strategy … involv[ing] the cerebral hemispheres differently in Arabic than in Hebrew or English" (77). The three chapters in this section demonstrate the advances of the past few decades in the study of cognitive processing and reading in Arabic.

The four articles in the book's third section are devoted to the development of Arabic reading and spelling as well as disorders involving these skills; they will be especially useful to reading specialists and those training teachers of Arabic to native speakers. Wessam Mohamed, Karin Landerl, and Thomas Elbert provide an epidemiological survey of specific reading and spelling disabilities among Arabic-speaking Egyptian third graders (n=1116), finding that the combined rate of reading/spelling deficits was high but low for each in isolation. Naama Friedmann and Manar Haddad-Hanna offer an especially thorough taxonomic description of the numerous types and subtypes of Arabic developmental dyslexia. Dorit Ravid, Dina Naoum, and Suheir Nasser's study of narrative development in Arabic uses audio and video data to compare retellings of a story by ninety-seven native speakers of Palestinian Arabic across seven age groups (four-to five-year-olds to adults); subjects were read the story in MSA and instructed to retell it in MSA or their native dialect as they preferred. The final paper in this section, by Hanadi Abu Ahmed, Raphiq Ibrahim, and David L. Share, reports a longitudinal study of the cognitive predictors of early reading ability, grades...