Abstract
Research on the typical and impaired grammatical acquisition of Arabic is limited. This study systematically examined the morphosyntactic abilities of Arabic-speaking children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) using a novel sentence repetition task. The usefulness of the task as an indicator of DLD in Arabic was determined. A LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings) sentence repetition task was developed in Palestinian Arabic (LITMUS-SR-PA-72) and administered to 30 children with DLD (M = 61.50 months, SD = 11.27) and 60 age-matched typically developing (TD) children (M = 63.85 months, SD = 10.16). The task targeted grammatical structures known to be problematic for Arabic-speaking children with DLD (language specific) and children with DLD across languages (language independent). Responses were scored using binary, error, and structural scoring methods. Children with DLD scored below TD children on the LITMUS-SR-PA-72, in general, and in the repetition of language-specific and language-independent structures. The frequency of morphosyntactic errors was higher in the DLD group relative to the TD group. Despite the large similarity of the type of morphosyntactic errors between the two groups, some atypical errors were exclusively produced by the DLD group. The three scoring methods showed good diagnostic power in the discrimination between children with DLD and children without DLD. Sentence repetition was an area of difficulty for Palestinian Arabic-speaking children with DLD. The DLD group demonstrated difficulties with language-specific and language-independent structures, particularly complex sentences with noncanonical word order. Most grammatical errors made by the DLD group resembled those of the TD group and were mostly omissions or substitutions of grammatical affixes or omissions of function words. SR appears to hold promise as a good indicator for the presence or absence of DLD in Arabic. Further validation of these findings using population-based studies is warranted. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.16968043.
Highlights
Research on the typical and impaired grammatical acquisition of Arabic is limited
Unlike binary and error scoring methods, structural scoring did not penalize the child for repetition errors that did not alter the grammatical structure assessed by the sentence
The LRs+ were higher than 10 and the LRs− were less than 0.1. These values suggest that a child with developmental language disorder (DLD) was more than 10 times more likely to obtain a “fail” score on the LITMUS-sentence repetition (SR)-Palestinian Arabic (PA)-72 than a typically developing (TD) child and only less than 0.1 times more likely to obtain a “pass” score than a TD child. These findings indicate that a score above or below the specified cutoff point on the LITMUS-SR-PA-72 could be interpreted with strong confidence as indicative of the presence or absence of DLD
Summary
Research on the typical and impaired grammatical acquisition of Arabic is limited. This study systematically examined the morphosyntactic abilities of Arabic-speaking children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) using a novel sentence repetition task. Research has focused on identifying the psycholinguistic phenotypic markers that are characteristically associated with DLD and can be used as indicators of the disorder (e.g., Rice & Wexler, 1996)
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