Speed of Lexical Access to Arabic and English Letters

Abstract

To examining the role of cultural differences in speed of lexical access, we employed two types of Posner (1967) name matching task: Arabic and English types. We have conducted an experiment on 30 native Arabic speakers from King Saud University. The results showed that the lexical access to physically identical letters is faster than lexical access to the nominally identical letters. However, there was a significant effect of task's type in the speed of lexical access. Also, the correlations coefficients varied with task's type. In its entirety, these results suggest that the cultural aspects have a role in the speed of lexical access.

Keywords: Lexical Access, long term memory, letters matching.