Morphological skills among native Arab kindergarteners with developmental language disorders

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Speech-Language Pathology

Background:

• Morphological skills are crucial for language development.
• Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) can impact various language domains, including morphology.
• Arabic morphology presents unique challenges due to its complex inflectional system.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare inflectional morphology skills in Arabic between children with DLD and typically developing (TD) children.
• To assess both the identification and production of Arabic inflectional morphology.
• To investigate potential underlying reasons for morphological difficulties in Arab children with DLD.

Main Methods:

• Two tasks were administered to assess Arabic inflectional morphology: an identification task and a production task.
• Pseudowords were utilized to evaluate the application of learned inflectional rules.
• Participants included 14 native Arab kindergarteners with DLD and 15 TD kindergarteners.

Main Results:

• TD children significantly outperformed children with DLD on both morphology tasks.
• Children with DLD demonstrated significantly better performance on the identification task compared to the production task.
• Performance differences suggest specific challenges in applying morphological knowledge for children with DLD.

Conclusions:

• Children with DLD exhibit significant deficits in Arabic inflectional morphology compared to TD peers.
• The findings suggest that difficulties in morphological skills for Arab children with DLD may stem from broader challenges in acquiring language regularities.
• Intervention strategies may need to address both receptive and expressive morphological abilities, considering the distinct challenges in production.