Reading Arabic with the diacritics for short vowels: vowelised but not necessarily easy to read

This study examined the influence of diacritics for short vowels on the accuracy and fluency of reading aloud in Arabic orthography among a sample of 1516 children in first–sixth grades. For this purpose, the children’s reading was evaluated using two lists of directly comparable words: one without diacritics for short vowels (unvowelised) and the other with diacritics for short vowels (fully vowelised). Our results indicate that reading...