Neurocognitive modeling of the two language varieties in Arabic Diglossia Reem Khamis-Dakwar & Karen Froud Diglossia is a sociolinguistic

situation whereby distinct social functions are in a complementary distribution between formal and colloquial varieties of a language. However, little is known about the cognitive inter-relationships between the two language varieties in diglossic situations. Integrating available neurophysiological evidence has the potential to elucidate mental representations of the two language varieties of Arabic. We present three complementary studies: the first two utilize electroencephalography (EEG) as a tool to investigate lexical and phonological levels of representation in Standard and Spoken varieties of Arabic, and the third examines the development of diglossic knowledge and awareness of children. Taken together, evidence from these three studies provides a unique insight into the organization of mental representations that underpin diglossic language processing. The first study examines the neurofunctional bases of codeswitching between Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Colloquial Palestinian Arabic (PCA). Six native speakers of PCA listened to sentences from three experimental conditions: grammatical sentences in MSA or PCA, sentences with a semantically anomalous final word, and sentences with code-switched final words. Sentences were presented auditorily in random order, and participants were asked to judge whether the final word was in the same language as the rest of each sentence. High density EEG recordings were obtained during the task, and Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) were derived from the continuous recordings through time-locked averaging of epochs starting at final-word onset for each sentence type. N400 amplitude increased with the presence of semantic anomaly in both MSA and PCA, whereas the codeswitching manipulation resulted in a variety of changes both earlier (N200) and later (P600) in the processing stream. The second study used EEG to investigate the mismatch negativity (MMN) responses of native speakers of Levantine Arabic to switching between Spoken and Standard language varieties, while controlling for semantic, acoustic-phonetic, and phonological variables. MMN is a negative-going ERP that can be elicited in the absence of attentional processing. MMN studies have shown speech perception to be based on language-specific phoneme traces, with MMN elicited only when pre-existing traces are activated. Utilizing a passive-listening oddball paradigm, we presented eighteen participants with four real-word conditions: 1) PCA words with different meanings (PCA a? (right) ad (border)); 2) PCA and MSA words with the same meanings (PCA a?, MSA aq (right)); 3) switching between varieties and between meanings (PCA a?- MSA a (luck)); and 4) switching across languages (PCA fi:l (elephant): English feel)). High-density EEG recordings were simultaneously acquired, and continuous recordings were subjected to time-locked averaging and montaging to derive ERPs. A significant MMN response was found in response to the phoneme category switch within language varieties. However, a significantly greater MMN response was found for variety shift (where the standard and deviant belong to two different language varieties but have the same meaning). These findings suggest that the switch between varieties has neurophysiological consequences over and above a phonemic category change. Together, these EEG findings point to separateness of the two lexicons in Arabic diglossia. The third study behaviorally examines diglossic knowledge of children in the two language varieties in Arabic, across all language domains (semantics, morphosyntax, phonology and pragmatics) with respect to features that differentiate MSA and PCA. The study reveals that at the lexical level, children acquired non-overlapping items earlier than overlapping ones, i.e.

words that are similar lexemes or cognates were acquired earlier than words that are phonologically or morphologically related in MSA and PCA. This observation supports the view of two separate lexicons in Arabic diglossia, as suggested by the neurophysiological investigations of lexical and phonological switching. However, a different pattern was observed at the morphosyntactic level. Children showed continuity in the acquisition of overlapping items, and a delay in the acquisition of non-overlapping items, suggesting the existence of a shared grammatical system for the two language varieties. Taken together, these observations lead to a model for Arabic disglossia as shown in the figure below. We discuss the implications of this model for future neurophysiological and behavioral investigations of diglossia and bilingualism.

Low Variety Lexicon

High Variety Lexicon

grammar