ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief review of diglossia as a sociolinguistic phenomenon, and provides an overview of neurolinguistic research on Arabic diglossia. Some investigations of the psycholinguistics of Arabic have suggested differentiated mental organization and processing for Arabic literacy, compared to other languages such as English and Hebrew. The chapter discusses the significance of neurophysiological investigations to enhance the understanding of cognitive representation and processing of the two language varieties in Arabic diglossia. It introduces the Event-Related Potential (ERP) methodologies and describes some language ERP correlates that offer opportunities to investigate different levels of representation and processing in diglossia. The chapter reviews the application of this approach to studies of mental representation in Arabic diglossia, to date. It highlights the benefits of incorporating neurophysiological investigations into Arabic linguistic studies in order to elucidate the processing of Arabic diglossia in children and adults.
