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No description available.

Arabic is a Semitic language that remains relatively understudied compared to Indo-European languages. In a number of experiments, we investigated aspects of reading in Arabic by tracking readers’ eye movements during reading. Eye tracking is a sensitive and non-invasive methodology to study reading that provides a highly detailed account of the time course of processing linguistic stimuli. Indeed, a huge body of evidence supports the suggestion that readers’ eye movements are tightly linked to the mental processes they engage in during reading. Arabic features a number of unique linguistic and typographical characteristics. These include the potential use of diacritical marks to indicate how a word is pronounced, and also the clear preference of readers for using font types that preserve a natural variability in printed letter sizes. In our research we documented for the first time in Arabic the influence on eye movements of word-level variables such as number of letters, spatial extent, initial bigram characteristics, and the presence or absence of Arabic diacritical marks. Our results replicated and expanded upon the existing literature that uses eye movements to study linguistic processing. Specifically, our findings further clarified how each of these word aspects influence the eye guidance system, as well as the extent, and time course of this influence. We also investigated aspects of Arabic sentence processing where we documented the influences on specific words and on global sentence processing of readers’ grammatical parsing preferences, expectations for certain diacritization patterns, as well as sentence structure and diacritization mode. We consider the investigations presented here to be a step towards widening the evidence base on which our understanding of reading, in universal terms, is founded.

Arabic phonetics and phonology have not been adequately studied for the purposes of speech synthesis and speech synthesis corpus design. The only sources of knowledge available are either archaic or targeted towards other disciplines such as education. This research conducted a three-stage study. First, Arabic phonology research was reviewed in general, and the results of this review were triangulated with expert opinions – gathered throughout the project – to create a novel formalisation of Arabic phonology for speech synthesis. Secondly, this formalisation was used to create a speech corpus in Modern Standard Arabic and this corpus was used to produce a speech synthesiser. This corpus was the first to be constructed and published for this dialect of Arabic using scientifically-supported phonological formalisms. The corpus was semi-automatically annotated with phoneme boundaries and stress marks; it is word-aligned with the orthographical transcript. The accuracy of these alignments was compared with previous published work, which showed that even slightly less accurate alignments are sufficient for producing high quality synthesis. Finally, objective and subjective evaluations were conducted to assess the quality of this corpus. The objective evaluation showed that the corpus based on the proposed phonological formalism had sufficient phonetic coverage compared with previous work. The subjective evaluation showed that this corpus can be used to produce high quality parametric and unit selection speech synthesisers. In addition, it showed that the use of orthographically extracted stress marks can improve the quality of the generated speech for general purpose synthesis. These stress marks are the first to be tested for Modern Standard Arabic, which thus opens this subject for future research.

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This study aims to provide a comprehensive account of the segmental and prosodic phonology and the morphology of Wadi Mousa Arabic, a rural Jordanian dialect spoken in the south of Jordan that has not yet been investigated. The data of the study come from twenty native-speaker participants whose ages ranged from 45 years to 88 years. WM Arabic has a cluster of linguistic features that distinguish it from its fellow Jordanian dialects. These include the merger of *ḍ and *ḏ into /ḏ /; the realisation of the uvular stop *q as /g/; and the retention of the voiceless velar stop /k/ in all contexts. The phonology is divided into melodic and prosodic phonology. Under melodic phonology, I examine assimilation processes (definite article assimilation, assimilation of t- to coronal obstruents, sonorant assimilation, non-coronal assimilation, and emphasis spread) and umlaut. Unlike some Jordanian dialects where emphasis is never blocked, rightward emphasis in WM Arabic is blocked by high front segments, /i/, /y/ and /š/. Under prosodic phonology, I examine syllable structure, word stress, and major prosodic processes, including epenthesis, syncope, V-V resolution, degemination, glottal stop prosthesis, shortening of long vowels, and pre-suffix vowel lengthening. The study then examines the morphological aspects of verbs and nouns in WM Arabic. Twelve verb forms are utilised in the dialect, including the first ten verb forms (I-X) plus the first two quadriliteral forms (Q1 and Q2). Under nominal morphology, the study examines substantives, their templatic patterns, and morphological features; adjectives, their templatic patterns, agreement with the head noun in terms of gender, number and definiteness; demonstratives; verbal derivatives; pronouns; quantifiers; numerals and diminutives. The study provides a short lexicon which aims to document some of the basic terms in the dialect, following Behnstedt and Woidich’s Word Atlas of Arabic Dialects (2011). These classes are: man, professions, animals, nature, violence, feelings and states, money, function words, plants, agriculture, verbs, adverbs of time, construction, household, adverbs of time, human qualities and deficits, body parts, cooking, belongings and weddings.

Despite the vast research on simultaneous interpreting in different settings, little is known about interpreting practices in the field of TV, particularly between Arabic and English. The recent events of the Arab Spring led to more reliance on simultaneous interpreting for broadcasting presidential speeches live to audiences worldwide. Emotive overtones were a salient feature in the Arabic-language speeches and posed challenges to the TV interpreters who had to handle other difficulties and constraints involved in the task. The current study aims to investigate the way TV interpreters, who worked in the simultaneous mode, handled the task of conveying the emotive overtones employed in Arabic-language political speeches into English. It also aims to examine the difficulties and challenges that emerged during this process and might have influenced the interpreters’ choices. The study also evaluates the way the TV interpreters handled this task and whether the original emotive effect was maintained, upgraded, downgraded or abandoned in their renditions. To achieve its aims, the study analysed a corpus of four Arabic presidential political speeches delivered during the Arab Spring, along with their English simultaneous interpretations produced by different international TV stations. The analysis relied on a macro framework and a micro framework. The macro framework presents an overview of the wider context of the Arabic-language speeches and the individual speakers to help understand the linguistic choices made by the speakers. The micro framework investigates the linguistic tools which were employed by the speakers to stir people’s emotions. The study analyses the Arabic-language speeches through applying emotive categories which are based on Shamaa’s (1978) classification of emotive meaning according to their linguistic level: phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic and lexical levels. The micro level also investigates the strategies which were used by the TV interpreters to render the emotive linguistic tools into English. By adopting a qualitative approach, the study aims to contribute to a better understanding of TV simultaneous interpreting between Arabic and English, as well as the practices of TV interpreters when working into their B language and rendering emotiveness.

This thesis investigated reading comprehension levels amongst Maltese bilingual students. A total of 428 participants, aged between 8 and 13, from state schools across Malta, were tested and the results of five studies presented. The primary purpose underlying the research was to inform the development of assessment procedures that can be used in the identification of children who have specific difficulties in reading within the Maltese context. Initially, the suitability of reading comprehension measures currently used in Malta was assessed. Given the potential problems identified with these measures for the dominant Maltese language population in state schools in Malta, passages and comprehension questions were developed in Maltese appropriate for this population. Conclusions from this work argue for the need for assessment tools, particularly targeting reading comprehension, that incorporate linguistic and cultural aspects of the cohorts targeted by the tools - recommendations for practice, therefore, were a focus of the discussion of the work presented. The developed reading comprehension measure focused on reading aloud to allow reading accuracy and rate to be included in assessment procedures, and the evidence from the work reported in this thesis suggested that this procedure would show similar results to a silent reading comprehension measure. A further aim of the thesis was to investigate cognitive/linguistic predictors of reading comprehension in normally developing Maltese readers and also in Maltese-speaking children with dyslexia. These data argued for younger or less experienced readers (those with dyslexia) to show greater influences of word level processes on reading comprehension than older able readers, who mainly showed influences of language processes, such as syntactic awareness, vocabulary and listening comprehension. These latter findings were considered in terms of theoretical views on the development of reading comprehension across orthographies and to inform procedures designed to identify underlying reasons for particular performance characteristics in literacy assessments.

This thesis discusses some different types of wh-questions available in the dialect of Syrian Arabic. It demonstrates that this variety of Arabic has a very rich and varied system of wh-questions. As a prelude to this, it will first be shown that, as far as basic word order in the clause is concerned, two possible orders are allowed in SA, VSO and SVO. It will be argued that in the past tense, the unmarked order is VSO and SVO as a commonly occurring alternative. In the VSO order, the verb raises to a higher functional head F, a lower head in the complementizer system following Rizzi (2001). The subject raises to SpecTP due to the rich agreement system in SA. In the SVO order, the NP is either definite or specific indefinite. Assuming that F can be marked with a definite/specific feature, it can attract a subject to its specifier. Alternatively F can be marked with a [Focus] feature so it can attract a wh-phrase when a higher interrogative head INT is merged with F. It will be shown that in wh-questions, the V-S order is obligatory; however, this is not a consequence of a V2 constraint. Following Holmberg (2014), it will be argued that this order follows from a constraint on movement across the head F where the verb lands. Only one XP can precede the finite verb in F. After this, the strategies for wh-question formation in SA will be discussed, demonstrating that the in-situ strategy is marginal, being employed only in discourse linked contexts. It will be argued that Merchant‟s (2001, 2005) analysis of multiple wh-questions does not account for the facts of SA. Instead, it will be proposed that they should be accounted for in terms of the clause structure folding approach discussed in Moro (2011). A further topic covered will be pied-piping in SA. Facts from this domain will be used to argue against Heck‟s (2009) edge generalization, according to which a wh-pied-piper has to move to the edge of the pied-piped phrase. However, it will be shown that there is no such movement in the possessive structure in SA, as illustrated in (1): (1) a. hada beit bassel. this house Bassel „This is Bassel‟s house.‟ v b. beit miin hada? house who this „Whose house is this?‟ In (1a), the possessor appears in post-nominal position. In the case of a wh-possessor, as in (1b), it still appears in that position. Specifically, it does not undergo movement to the edge of the pied-piped phrase. In order to account for the pied-piping facts in this construction, I investigate the Q/wh-agreement system in SA, following Cable (2007), trying to determine whether the facts in (1) might follow from SA being a non-Q/wh-agreement language. However, I show that SA is an agreement language and propose that the behaviour of Wh-possessive phrases can be accounted for in terms of a combination of Cinque‟s (2000, 2005) roll up movement and Cable‟s (2007) Q-theory. As I will show, this analysis also accounts elegantly for the fact that wh-possessive phrases cannot contain adjectives. Along with the long extraction strategy, SA also employs the partial wh-movement (wh-scope marking) strategy for questioning out of embedded questions, as in (2): (2) šw fakkar-ty maʕ miin knt ʕam iħki? what thought-2SG.F with who was.1SG PROG speaking „What did you think? Who was I talking to?‟ It will be argued that there is no direct dependency between the wh-scope marker and the embedded wh-phrase. The wh-scope marker is not an expletive. It is base generated in the complement of a copula clause. It will be rgued that the wh-scope marker and the embedded wh-clause form a small clause embedded in the complement of the main verb. This clause takes the embedded wh-clause as its subject and the wh-scope marker as its predicate assimilating the embedded wh-clause to a free relative clause headed by a null head. Another strategy for questioning out of embedded questions in SA involves what looks like clausal pied piping: vi (3) addesh ʕmr-a al-et-l-ak? how.much age-her said-3SG.F.SU-to-2SG.M.OBJ „How old is she, did she say?‟ It will be argued that sentences like (3) are instances not of pied piping but of interrogative slifting, an operation that is different from both scope marking and long distance movement. Following Haddican et al (2014), it will be proposed that the slifted clause does not originate in the complement of the main clause. Rather, it is coindexed with a null operator merged in that position.