Applied Psycholinguistics 24 (2003), 431–451 Printed in the United States of America DOI: 10.1017.S0142716403000225 Linguistic distance and initial reading acquisition: The case of Arabic diglossia ELINOR SAIEGH–HADDAD Bar-Ilan University ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Elinor Saiegh–Haddad, English Department, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan 52900, Israel. E-mail: saieghe@mail.biu.ac.il ABSTRACT The study examined phonemic awareness and pseudoword decoding in kindergarten and first grade Arabic native children. Because native speakers of Arabic first learn to read in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), a language structurally distinct from the local form of the language they grow up speaking, it was hypothesized that the linguistic differences between the two varieties, the so-called diglossic variables, would interfere with the acquisition of basic reading processes in MSA. Two diglossic variables were examined: phoneme and word syllabic structure. The children’s phoneme isolation and pseudoword decoding skills were tested. The results showed that both diglossic vari- ables interfered with the children’s performance of both tasks in both grades. The findings support the role of linguistic distance in the acquisition of basic reading processes in a diglossic context. A growing body of research has helped anchor the hypothesis that reading ac- quisition is grafted onto oral language skills. This assumption, however, did not characterize either theory making or reading practice in the field until fairly recently. Until the beginning of the 1980s it was still believed that a major determinant of individual differences in reading performance was the ability of readers to use linguistic redundancy and sentence context for word guessing (Goodman, 1965, 1968, 1976; Smith, 1971, 1973, 1975). Later contradictory evidence showed, however, that when using reading materials of comparable difficulty, skilled and less-skilled readers, matched on word decoding, are equally efficient in their use of context (Becker, 1985; Briggs, Austin, & Under- wood, 1984; Perfetti, 1985; Perfetti, Goldman, & Hogaboam, 1979; Pring & Snowling, 1986; Simpson & Foster, 1986; West & Stanovich, 1978). Once word decoding came to be realized as the primary determinant of individual variations in reading achievement, researchers began to inquire about the underlying skills that predicted word decoding. It was this question that gave impetus to recent concerns about the role of oral language in the acquisition of basic reading processes.  2003 Cambridge University Press 0142-7164/03 $12.00