Phonological development in school-aged Kuwaiti Arabic children with Down syndrome: A pilot study

Studies on atypical phonological development are very limited for Arabic, and to date no studies on Arabic have investigated the development of phonology in children with conditions such as Down Syndrome. Arabic, like other Semitic languages, is rich in consonants and consonantal variation. However, it differs greatly from region to region, and so reports on individual dialects or regional dialects are necessary. Kuwaiti Arabic, the focus of the present paper, is similar to other dialects in the Gulf region.

This is a preliminary study to examine the phonological development of school-aged Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children with Down Syndrome in order to start to address the research gap noted above.

Six Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children were recruited for this pilot study from integrated public schools where children with disabilities and typically developing children are enrolled in the State of Kuwait: three male and three female students, age range of 5;10-12;3 years. All participants had the same single word speech test of 100 words. The first author, a native speaker of Kuwaiti Arabic, audio-recorded and phonetically transcribed the sample with the help of two speech-language pathologists from Kuwait. Reliability was confirmed by the first author and another expert rater. Both match and mismatch analyses were performed and compared to existing literature.

Overall consonant accuracy across participants was 50%, with a variety of matches across consonant categories. However, the participants also exhibited a wide range of mismatches across positions in words and phonological features (place, manner, and laryngeal features). Place substitutions were the most frequent. Some sounds exhibited double (place and manner) mismatches. The most common word structure mismatch was consonant cluster reduction (no matches for word-initial clusters). Mismatch patterns resembled both those of normally developing Kuwaiti children and those of English speakers with Down Syndrome in certain ways.

This pilot study provides preliminary information for clinicians regarding the speech or children with Down Syndrome (DS), not only in Kuwait but also in the Gulf region where there are similarities to Kuwaiti Arabic.