Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research最新文献

Purpose: This study describes the development of verb inflectional morphology in an urban dialect of Palestinian Arabic (PA) spoken in northern Israel, specifically in the city of Haifa, and explores the effect of language typology on acquisition.

Method: We analyzed naturalistic longitudinal speech samples from one monolingual Arabic-speaking girl aged 1;11-2;3 during spontaneous interactions with family members.

Results: Initially, truncated forms ("bare stems") were common but disappeared by the end of the study. By age 1;11, the girl was in the proto-morphological stage, displaying clear three-member mini-paradigms. Affixation complexity gradually increased, with adjacent and obligatory suffixes acquired before distant and optional prefixes. The early acquisition of indicative prefixes (b-, m-) preceded the later emergence of complex proclitics (e.g., volitive d-, progressive ʕam), suggesting gradual, systematic morphological acquisition.

Conclusions: We propose three principles for the development of PA verb inflection: (a) Adjacency: Affixes adjacent to the base are acquired first. (b) R-salience: Suffixes are acquired earlier than prefixes. (c) Obligatoriness: Obligatory morphemes precede optional ones. These principles predict the girl's morphological development and reflect sensitivity to PA's richly inflecting typology. This study highlights the need for detailed descriptive research that is essential for understanding language acquisition processes and informing assessment tools, intervention programs, and educational curricula for PA-speaking children.

Purpose: We investigated the role of spoken language in the acquisition of literacy in the context of Arabic diglossia, where the written language, Standard Arabic, deviates substantially from the spoken language, Colloquial Arabic, children acquire naturally from birth.

Method: The participants (N = 110; 40 girls) were Saudi Arabic-speaking children in Grades 2-4. Children completed assessments of oral paragraph reading and word decoding using a vowelized script. They also completed three spoken assessments of Colloquial Arabic, which include sentence comprehension, sentence completion, and pragmatic knowledge, as well as a test of phonological awareness. We used path analysis to investigate the contributions of each of the spoken language indicators, decoding, and phonological awareness to reading comprehension (RC) in single and multiple serial mediator models.

Results: We found that spoken language (i.e., sentence comprehension, sentence completion, and pragmatic knowledge) and word decoding uniquely contributed to RC. Moreover, word decoding mediated the association between spoken language and RC. The path from spoken language to phonological awareness, then to word decoding, and finally to RC was inconclusive.

Conclusions: While most studies on literacy acquisition in the context of Arabic diglossia focus on the linguistic distance between the colloquial (spoken) and the standard (written) language varieties, our results highlight the important contribution of spoken language skills to reading skills in Arabic despite this linguistic gap. The important implication of these findings is that spoken language interventions aimed at boosting children's narrative language skills in their home language (Colloquial Arabic) are an important tool for building a foundation for literacy in diglossia contexts.

Purpose: This study presents a comprehensive exploration of lexical and grammatical development in Palestinian Arabic (PA). The study aims to test the validity of the Palestinian Arabic Communicative Development Inventory (PA-CDI) as well as generate growth curves for lexical and morphosyntactic development, examine the order of emergence of both lexical and morphosyntactic categories, and explore the contribution of demographic and developmental factors to language development.

Method: Data were collected from 1,399 parents of PA children aged 18-36 months using an online PA-CDI.

Results: The results show that as age increased, so did lexical and morphosyntactic production, along with considerable variability across individuals. While lexical development in PA resembles the order observed in other languages with nouns preceding verbs and adjectives, morphosyntactic development indicates early emergence of verbal inflectional morphology prior to noun pluralization or negation. Age of word combination and health problems are predictive of lexical and morphosyntactic development, and so are parental concerns.

Conclusions: Our findings indicate the potential of the PA-CDI as an assessment tool for lexical and morphosyntactic development among PA-speaking children in Israel. Our developmental growth curves may also be used to identify children at risk for developmental language disorder, particularly those falling below the 10th percentile, thus allowing for early identification and early intervention. The use of background variables, specifically parental concerns, health issues, and word combinations, along with the PA-CDI, could potentially enhance the precision of language delay assessment.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.26026777.

Purpose: The main aim of the current study was to examine the longitudinal impact of verb inflectional distance on morphological awareness among Arabic-speaking children from kindergarten (K) to third grade. The study also investigated the impact of testing children in two language varieties, Spoken Palestinian dialect (SPD) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), on the development of morphological awareness.

Method: Sixty-two children were followed longitudinally at three time points: K, Grade 1 (G1), and Grade 3 (G3). Each child completed two parallel orally administered inflectional awareness pseudoverb tasks in the spoken and in the standard variety at each grade. The items were classified by form and function into two main distance levels: low-diglossic and high-diglossic, representing the closest and the farthest distance between SPD and MSA morphemes, respectively.

Results: The findings indicated that morphological awareness was more difficult for high-diglossic morphemes than for low-diglossic ones. Moreover, the findings point to different paths in the developmental trajectory of verb inflectional awareness by distance levels and language variety: In SPD, the difference in children's awareness between low-diglossic morphemes and high-diglossic morphemes decreased across grades and disappeared in G3, whereas, in MSA, this difference significantly increased from K to G1 and G3.

Conclusions: These findings demonstrate the substantial impact of verb inflectional distance on morphological awareness development before and during the initial process of learning to read. Results are discussed within the context of linguistic distance and the development of metalinguistic processing skills with implications for assessment and intervention.

Purpose: This study aimed to evaluate the stability of phonological awareness (PA) and language achievements between kindergarten and first grade among Arabic-speaking children.

Method: A total of 1,158 children were assessed in PA and language skills in both grades and were classified based on distinct and integrated achievements on PA and language following percentiles' cutoff criteria. The classification of distinct achievements constituted high, intermediate, low, and very low achievement-based groups for each domain. The classification of the integrated achievements on both domains constituted four groups: intermediate-high PA and language, very low PA, very low language, and doubly low (very low PA and language). Descriptive statistics and McNemar's tests were used to examine the stability of these groups.

Results: The analyses showed a significant improvement in achievements on most tasks. The distinct classification for PA and language indicated that many more kindergarteners in the extreme distribution with high and very low achievement levels maintained this profile in first grade compared to those with intermediate achievements. For PA, 55.7% of kindergarteners with high, 30% with intermediate, 30.4% with low, and 45.5% with very low achievements maintained their achievements in first grade. For language, 52.5% of kindergarteners with high, 34.5% with intermediate, 38.8% with low, and 59.8% with very low achievements maintained their language achievements. The integrated classification indicated a higher achievement stability rate for kindergarteners with intermediate-high PA and language (91.3%) and for doubly low achievers (84.7%) compared to very low PA (24.1%) or very low language (31.8%) achievers.

Conclusions: The study indicated a higher variability in the distribution of the intermediate achievements compared to the high and very low achievements, which were more stable across grade. The results emphasize the need for dynamic linguistic assessments and early intervention for children with very low achievements in PA and language who show a poor prognosis.

Purpose: Although children with developmental language disorder (DLD) are known to have difficulties with emergent literacy skills, few available studies have examined emergent literacy skills in Arabic-speaking children with DLD. Even though Arabic language characteristics, such as diglossia and orthographic structure, influence the acquisition of literacy in Arabic-speaking children, research shows that oral language skills, such as vocabulary, and cognitive skills, such as verbal short-term memory (VSTM), predict literacy in Arabic-speaking children. Moreover, linguistic and memory abilities are impaired in children with DLD, including Arabic-speaking children. The current study examines the relationships between oral language, VSTM, and emergent literacy skills in Arabic-speaking typically developing (TD) children and children with DLD.

Method: Participants were 40 TD children (20 girls; aged 4;0-6;11 [years;months]) and 26 children with DLD (nine girls, aged 4;0-6;11). All participants were monolingual Arabic speakers and matched on age and socioeconomic status. A set of comprehensive Arabic language (vocabulary knowledge, morphosyntactic, and listening comprehension skills), VSTM, and emergent literacy (phonological awareness and letter knowledge skills) tests were administered.

Results: The DLD group scored significantly lower than the TD group on language, VSTM, and emergent literacy measures. Results revealed that the contributions of oral language and VSTM to emergent literacy skills across TD and DLD groups were different. In the TD group, VSTM predicted emergent literacy skills, whereas in the DLD groups, both vocabulary knowledge and VSTM predicted emergent literacy skills.

Conclusions: This study represents an important first step in understanding emergent literacy skills and their relationships to language and memory in Arabic-speaking children with and without DLD. The implications of these findings for clinical and education provision are discussed.

Purpose: Word learning requires the creation of phonological and semantic representations and links in long-term memory. Phonological distance of a given word from the spoken language affects children's lexical-phonological representations and processing. The study investigates the role of the phonological distance of Modern Standard Arabic (StA) words from the child's Spoken Arabic (SpA) vernacular in word learning in Arabic diglossia. It also examines whether, given their vulnerable phonological skills, children with developmental language disorder (DLD) show a stronger impact of phonological distance on word learning than children with typical language development (TLD).

Method: One hundred children with TLD and DLD in kindergarten and in first grade (25 per group) were tested on comprehension and production word-learning probes manipulating phonological distance. Learning monosyllabic and disyllabic nonwords encoding only SpA phonemes was compared with the learning of parallel nonwords encoding one unique StA consonant each.

Results: Repeated-measures analyses of variance showed higher word learning scores in children with TLD on both probes and for both syllable lengths. Moreover, all children fared significantly lower, in both comprehension and production probes, when the target stimulus was phonologically distant from the spoken language. Finally, an interaction effect was observed on the production probes, revealing differences in the developmental dynamics of phonological distance effects between the groups: Phonological distance hindered word learning among children with TLD in kindergarten, but among children with DLD in the first grade.

Conclusions: The results support the role of phonological distance as a phonological complexity factor in word learning in Arabic diglossia. Furthermore, they show that the effect of phonological distance is complex and it interacts with modality, language aptitude, and grade level. The theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.

Purpose: The current study aimed to examine morphosyntactic errors in sentences produced by DHH students, who are signers of Israeli Sign Language, and also users of Palestinian Colloquial Arabic (PCA) and written Modern Standard Arabic (MSA).

Method: Nineteen school-age DHH students participated in a sentence elicitation task in which they retold events portrayed in 24 videos in PCA and MSA. A control group of 19 hearing students was tested with the same task. Sentences in each language variety were coded for grammatical versus ungrammatical productions and for type of morphosyntactic errors for the latter. In addition, code-switched words were counted.

Results: The hearing group showed no morphosyntactic errors, whereas the DHH students showed morphosyntactic errors in both PCA and MSA. In addition, both groups code-switched in both PCA and MSA, with more code-switching in the MSA task than in the PCA task. Furthermore, an interaction with age revealed that young students code-switched more in MSA and older students code-switched more in PCA.

Conclusions: It is suggested that the morphosyntactic abilities of DHH students are incomplete in both language varieties. Lack of spoken language input may negatively influence the acquisition of spoken language, which impacts further the acquisition of the standard language in diglossic contexts. Code-switching is explained as both due to lexical gaps, when occurring in MSA, and an effort to raise the register in PCA.

Purpose: The Arabic verb system features a nonlinear root and pattern derivational morphology. Previous studies suggest that young Arabic and Hebrew speakers' early verb use is based on semantic complexity rather than derivational morphological structure. The present study examines the role of morphological and semantic complexity in the emergence of the verb derivational morphology in Arabic speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD) compared to children with typical language development (TLD).

Method: Natural language data were collected from native Arabic-speaking children (40 with DLD; aged 4-6 years and 133 with TLD aged 2;6-6;0 [years;months]) using picture-based elicitation tasks, and verbs were coded morphologically for derivational features and for features of semantic complexity.

Results: The results showed that children with DLD demonstrated a more limited production of verb patterns, both in types and in tokens, than age-matched children with TLD. Also, children with DLD age 5;0-6;0 were similar in types and tokens of verb patterns to younger children with TLD at the age of 3;6-4 years. Moreover, while children with TLD at the age of 2;6-3 years used a smaller number of verb patterns than older 4;0-5;0 aged children with DLD, the two groups were not different in verb semantics. Finally, the morphological and semantic diversity demonstrated by the children with DLD was similar to the morphological and semantic diversity shown by children with TLD.

Conclusion: Our findings support the conclusion that children with DLD and with TLD acquire the derivational verb system in the same pathway and the quantitative lexical differences between the two groups support a delay rather than a deviation from the typical developmental trajectory.