Re:Reading Arabic 'hard for brain'
by ithkuil on Sunday September 05, 2010 @08:45AM
(#1664423)
"The researchers looked at 40 university students. Some of the students only spoke Hebrew, while some also spoke and read Arabic well."
Does this mean that all the 40 students had prior knowledge in Hebrew?
Does this mean that the ones which "only spoke Hebrew", only spoke it (but don't read and write it), or "spoke only Hebrew" (but don't speak Arabic).
(perhaps I have the illusion that the sentence is ambiguous because I'm not a native English speaker, please correct me)
Anyway, I fail to understand how this scientific experiment is being designed.
I have the feeling that they are only testing the difficulty to learn Arabic glyphs with no scientifically measurable difficulty to learn Hebrew glyphs since the tested subjects already know them. But this cannot be true, I cannot believe that such a blatant experimental error is being performed and the results being published, so I have to be wrong. Can somebody shed more light on it?
Does this mean that all the 40 students had prior knowledge in Hebrew?
Does this mean that the ones which "only spoke Hebrew", only spoke it (but don't read and write it), or "spoke only Hebrew" (but don't speak Arabic).
(perhaps I have the illusion that the sentence is ambiguous because I'm not a native English speaker, please correct me)
Anyway, I fail to understand how this scientific experiment is being designed.
I have the feeling that they are only testing the difficulty to learn Arabic glyphs with no scientifically measurable difficulty to learn Hebrew glyphs since the tested subjects already know them. But this cannot be true, I cannot believe that such a blatant experimental error is being performed and the results being published, so I have to be wrong. Can somebody shed more light on it?