Brain Treats Literary Arabic as a Second Language

There several articles on the subject of learning foreign languages and their possible effects on the brain. The last research was done at the University of Haifa, which recently conducted a study that revealed that the brain treats literary Arabic like a second language. Dr Raphiq Ibrahim of the Edmond J. Safra Brain Research Center of the University has found that the cognitive differences between the literary and spoken languages are similar to the difference between a native and second language.

Ibrahim said that “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.” According to Dr Ibrahim, the Arabic language is composed of the everyday spoken language that has an array of local dialects; and written literary Arabic which is better known as Modern Standard Arabic or MSA.

Literary Arabic or MSA is the variety of Arabic that is used in formal speech and in writing. It is shared by all Arabic speakers and is learned in academic institutions together with writing and reading. The research conducted by the university wanted to scrutinize the cognitive status of spoken Arabic versus MSA in the brain through a priming technique that examines the effect of hearing words in one language and the mental processing of the same word in another language.

In order to observe the various brain reactions, the researcher compared the priming effects between MSA, Hebrew, and spoken Arabic among native Arabic speakers who have learned to master the three different languages. The results showed that the cognitive process in a student whose native language is Arabic but is also fluent in Hebrew has a similar cognitive process with MSA as with Hebrew.

Based on the results, Dr Ibrahim said that all Arabic speakers who are fluent in Modern Standard Arabic are considered to be de facto bilinguals. Ibrahim said, “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 said that the results show that this could have a negative effect on the development of reading skills and it could compromise a student’s achievements in the higher grades especially for less skilled students. The research results also suggest that MSA should be taught with techniques usually employed for the instruction of a second language and one of those techniques is auditory exposure to a second language as early as preschool and kindergarten.

Dr Raphiq Ibrahim’s study has been published in the Journal of Psychology Research and Behavior Management.