The Role of Diacritics in Designing Lexical Recognition Tests for Arabic

Lexical recognition tests are widely used to assess vocabulary knowledge. We investigate the role that diacritics play in designing an Arabic lexical recognition test. We compare a non-diacritized and a diacritized test in a user study and find that they are largely comparable in their ability to assess vocabulary proficiency. However, we argue that diacritized tests are better suited to control the test difficulty by allowing better nonwords and a more targeted selection of word forms.