The Cross-Linguistic Lexical Task in Tunisian Arabic: Adaptation and Pilot Evidence from Monolingual Children

The Cross-Linguistic Lexical Task (CLT) was developed to support comparable assessment of lexical abilities across languages, particularly in multilingual clinical contexts. This study reports the adaptation and pilot evaluation of the CLT in Tunisian Arabic, a spoken Arabic variety for which standardized lexical tools are limited. In Study 1, we followed established CLT procedures and examined adult-based adaptation metrics, including picture-label agreement and subjective age-of-acquisition ratings, to guide item selection. Overall agreement was high, with greater convergence for nouns than verbs. In Study 2, we piloted the adapted CLT in 13 monolingual Tunisian Arabic-speaking children. Accuracy was high across subtasks, with expected asymmetries: nouns were more accurate than verbs, and comprehension exceeded production. Verb production was the most demanding condition and showed the greatest inter-individual and item-level variability. These findings support the feasibility and linguistic appropriateness of the Tunisian Arabic CLT and provide a foundation for future normative and clinical validation.