The Brain of an Arabic Speaker Is Peculiar

It would appear that the brains of Arabic speakers do not process Literary Arabic as a mother tongue, but rather as a second language. The conclusion was drawn by experts at the University of Haifa Department of Learning Disabilities, who were led by Dr. Raphiq Ibrahim. He is a scientist at the UH Edmond J. Safra Brain Research Center for the Study of Learning Disabilities. Details of the new investigation have been published in the latest issue of the Journal of Psychology Research and Behavior Management, AlphaGalileo  reports.

“The cognitive disparity between the two languages is similar to the difference between a native and a second language. This offers an explanation for the objective and day-to-day difficulties that confront Arabic-speaking students when attempting to learn to read the non-spoken language,” the experts write in the newly-published papers. In Arabic countries, the everyday spoken language, with its varying local dialects, is different from the literary, written language, now called Modern Standard Arabic. The latter is shared among all countries that speak the language, and is officially taught in schools.

According to Ibrahim, in recent years, researchers have noticed an accentuated downward trend in Arabic-speaking students' ability to interpret the written language, especially in Israel and Arab countries. These people are far less able to interpret the literary form of the tongue than Hebrew-speaking students, for example. Other native speakers of their native tongues are also better at understanding written Arabic than those in Arab countries. The new study may have just provided researchers with a small lead on learning why that is.

“The results of this study indicate that linguistic structures of MSA that constitute the basis for reading acquisition are likely to be unfamiliar to the Arabic-speaking child when beginning to learn to read in first grade. This makes learning to read in Arabic a double mission, whereby children are expected to acquire in parallel an auditory linguistic system as well as a complex orthographic-visual language system,” Ibrahim explains. Additionally, he adds, it may be that MSA needs to be taught to first-grade students with the help of the same didactic techniques used to teach a second language.