Morphological skills among native Arab kindergarteners with developmental language disorders.

Abstract

This study tested morphological skills among 14 native Arab kindergarteners with developmental language disorder (DLD) (age; 5.51 ± 0.95, 10 boys and 4 girls) and fifteen kindergarteners with typical language development (TD) (age; 5.49 ± 0.37, 7 boys and 8 girls). The participants completed two tasks designed to assess the identification and production of inflectional morphology skills in Arabic. In the identification task, the participants were asked to choose between two alternatives of pseudowords, the one that corresponds to a conventional inflection in the language, based on the instruction they hear. In the production task, the participants were asked to produce an appropriate pronunciation of the pseudowords according to the requested inflection, without selecting from given alternatives. Pseudowords were used in both tasks to evaluate the efficiency of applying inflectional knowledge. The results showed that the performances of TD children were significantly higher than those of children with DLD, in both tasks. Additionally, children with DLD performed significantly better on the identification task than on the production task. These findings are discussed in light of the assumption that the difficulties in morphological skills in the group of native Arab children with DLD may result from general difficulties in acquiring language regularities.