Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this study we investigated the role of interword spacing and its interaction with Arabic root frequencies by studying readers' eye movement patterns when they read Arabic sentences. Our eye-tracking experiment results did not show any significant evidence for the interword spacing effect on Arabic word processing, which concurred with the earlier work by Leung et al. (2021). On the other hand, we replicated an earlier experiment conducted by Hermena et al. (2020) on the effect of Arabic root frequencies on word processing. Contrary to their finding, our results showed that words which differed in root frequencies significantly modulated eye movement measures. This provided another support to the status of Arabic non-concatenative roots as a morphological unit.