ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cognition
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1628051
The influence of visual attention on letter recognition and reading acquisition in Arabic
Provisionally accepted
- 1Africa Institute for Research in Economics and Social Sciences, Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, Rabat, Morocco, Rabat, Morocco
- 2Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Laboratoire de Psychologie et de NeuroCognition (LPNC), 38000 Grenoble, France, Grenoble, France
- 3Groupe d’Etudes des Méthodes de l’Analyse Sociologique de la Sorbonne (GEMASS), CNRS-Université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris, France, Paris, France
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The involvement of phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN) and letter knowledge (LK) in Arabic reading achievement is well established, but evidence for a unique contribution of visual attention span (VAS) remains limited. Studies in Indo-European languages have reported a direct and unique influence of VAS on reading, a relationship that might also be expected in Arabic. However, the recognition of the complex Arabic letters may require substantial attentional resources, thereby reducing the direct contribution of VAS to reading. In the present study, we assessed PA, RAN, LK and VAS in Arabic-speaking beginning readers, along with their reading fluency for both nonsense syllables and real words. Results showed strong relationships between all four predictors and both reading outcomes but LK and VAS were also substantially related. PA and VAS were unique predictors of reading, independent of RAN. However, the direct link between VAS and reading disappeared once LK was included as an additional predictor. VAS then only contributed indirectly to reading through its influence on LK. These findings suggest that a large share of attentional resources is required for the parallel, fine-grained processing of the multiple visual features of Arabic letters, thus taxing the attentional resources available for processing higher-order units. We therefore argue that the relationship between VAS and reading is modulated by the language script.
Keywords: reading acquisition, Arabic language · Orthography · Reading · Lexical decision · Letter connectivity, visual attention span, letter recognition, Graphic complexity
Received: 13 May 2025; Accepted: 16 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Ghandour, Trouche, Guillo and Valdois. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Sylviane Valdois, sylviane.valdois@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr
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