مجلة إحالات
Volume 8, Numéro 1, Pages 9-22
2026-06-01
(diglossia And Early Bilingualism: Word- Meaning Recognition Strategies In Libyan Arabic–english Preschoolers).
Authors : Hiyam Iqraf .
Abstract
This study investigates how Libyan Arabic-speaking preschool children recognize written English words and associate them with their meanings within a diglossic linguistic environment. Twenty-four children aged five to six years completed two experimental tasks designed to measure word-form recognition and meaning identification. In the first task, participants were asked to indicate whether they recognized written English words presented on flashcards. In the second task, they selected the picture corresponding to the meaning of each word from four possible options. Quantitative analysis revealed that children recognized written word forms more accurately than they identified their meanings. A two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed a significant effect of task type, indicating higher performance in word recognition than in meaning identification, as well as a significant age effect, with six-year-old children outperforming five-year-olds. Qualitative observations further indicated that children relied on strategies such as attention to visual features of words, phonological rehearsal, and semantic approximation when interpreting unfamiliar items. The findings suggest that visual familiarity with written forms may develop before stable semantic mapping during early second-language literacy acquisition. The study contributes to understanding how young learners in Arabic diglossic contexts begin to process written English and highlights the interaction between linguistic environment and early bilingual literacy development.
Keywords
diglossia, bilingualism, word recognition, semantic comprehension, preschoolers, Arabic, English, Libya..
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