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This paper explores tense and agreement marking in the spontaneous production of verbs in Arabic-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and two groups of typically developing children: one group matched for mean length of utterance, and the other group matched for age. The special characteristics of Arabic such as its rich bound morphology, intricate verb system, null subject properties, and lack of an infinitival form make it particularly valuable for determining universal versus language-specific aspects of SLI. The results indicate that the Arabic-speaking participants with SLI had obvious problems with verb morphology. They were significantly different from the two comparison groups of children on the percentage of correct use of tense and subject–verb agreement forms. Furthermore, when an error in verbal infection occurred, the substitute form was often an imperative form. The findings are examined in light of cross-linguistic research pertaining to the nature of the SLI deficit and its relationship with typical language learning.

The acquisition of dual and plural nominal marking was examined. Forty-four Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children aged 4-9 years were presented with a set of pictured stimuli of real and nonsense words and were asked to provide the plural and dual form. The results showed that Feminine Sound Plural (FSP) was used early on and more frequently than the Masculine Sound Plural (MSP) and the Broken Plural (BP). FSP was noticeably employed as the default form by younger children before differentiation gained ground, and it was often overgeneralized to MSP and BP. The children showed higher accuracy in using the dual than the plural forms. Finally, young children tended to use non-conventional ways to express number marking before acquiring target forms.

This study examined the production of three types of noun plural inflections, feminine sound plural (FSP), masculine sound plural (MSP), and broken plural (BP) in Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children with and without language impairment. A total of thirty-six Kuwaiti participants - twelve adults, twelve children with specific language impairment (SLI), and twelve typically developing age-matched controls (TD) were presented with twenty-seven pictured stimuli of real and nonsense words. The results showed that the TD children were significantly more accurate in using the required noun plural inflections than the SLI group. The TD children's preferred overgeneralization strategy was to substitute FSP for the regular MSP and irregular BP contexts much more than their peers with SLI. The performance of the SLI group also differed from that of their age-matched counterparts in the number of errors and their distribution across categories. The results are discussed in the light of relevant theories of atypical language development.

A limited number of studies have explored attitudes toward people who stutter (PWS) in different cultures. Recent studies have looked at the attitudes of Arab parents toward PWS. The current study explores attitudes reported by Arab teachers from Kuwait and provides a preliminary comparison with attitudes reported by teachers from the United States. Method: This study used an English version and an Arabic translation of a 14-item semantic differential (SD) scale (Burley & Rinaldi, 1986) to assess differences in American and Arab teachers' attitudes toward PWS. Results: A majority of Arab teachers from Kuwait reported neutral to positive attitudes toward PWS on the SD scale. However, ~1/3 of the Arab teachers reported relatively negative attitudes toward PWS on items relating to social skills and employability. A comparison of the American and Arab C

The authors of this study demonstrated that it is possible to positively modify preservice trainees' attitudes of people who stutter by using an educational documentary video.

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The purpose of this study was to test whether the content and function word dichotomy of speech disfluency found in English-speaking adults who stutter (AWS) was evident in a language other than English. A group of adult Arabic-speaking AWS were sampled across spontaneous speaking, oral reading, and single-word naming tasks. Moments of disfluency were identified and examined in regard to lexical category. Results indicated no significant differences in the amount of disfluency occurring on content and function words. The production of combined content-function words, a unique feature of the Arabic language, was associated with a high level of disfluency. The linguistic bases of stuttering are discussed in regard to language-specific influences.