ABSTRACT
Jassem al-fahid designed two related experiments to study how adult native speakers of Arabic make sense of written Arabic. His findings provide important support for our belief that there is a single process for making sense of print regardless of language and orthography. Although these are experimental studies, they support and extend the model of reading built on scientific realism. Scientific realism is hypothesis generating. Al-Fahid used his knowledge of Arabic linguistics and of the meaning-construction model of reading to study two unusual aspects of written Arabic. Written Arabic and the related Semitic language Hebrew use a semial-phabetic orthography that represents oral consonants but only minimally represents vowels. Both orthographies have a set of diacritical markings that can represent the vowels of oral language, but most written texts are not marked. The written forms of Hebrew and Arabic continue to be used for historical and cultural reasons, but they also work well for their language communities.
