Impact of Diglossia on Word and Non-word Repetition among Language Impaired and Typically Developing Arabic Native Speaking Children

Abstract

The study tested the impact of the phonological and lexical distance between a dialect of Palestinian Arabic spoken in the north of Israel (SpA) and Modern Standard Arabic (StA or MSA) on word and non-word repetition in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and in typically developing (TD) age-matched controls. Fifty kindergarten children (25 SLI, 25 TD; mean age 5;5) and fifty first grade children (25 SLI, 25 TD; mean age 6:11) were tested with a repetition task for 1–4 syllable long real words and pseudo words; Items varied systematically in whether each encoded a novel StA phoneme or not, namely a phoneme that is only used in StA but not in the spoken dialect targeted. Real words also varied in whether they were lexically novel, meaning whether the word is used only in StA, but not in SpA. SLI children were found to significantly underperform TD children on all repetition tasks indicating a general phonological memory deficit. More interesting for the current investigation is the observed strong and consistent effect of phonological novelty on word and non-word repetition in SLI and TD children, with a stronger effect observed in SLI. In contrast with phonological novelty, the effect of lexical novelty on word repetition was limited and it did not interact with group. The results are argued to reflect the role of linguistic distance in phonological memory for novel linguistic units in Arabic SLI and, hence, to support a specific Linguistic Distance Hypothesis of SLI in a diglossic setting. The implications of the findings for assessment, diagnosis and intervention with Arabic speaking children with SLI are discussed.

Does phonological distance impact quality of phonological representations? Evidence from Arabic diglossia

“…These studies showed that the acquisition of reading, and of related phonological processing skills, is impacted by the phonological distance between SpA and StA, both in impaired and in typically developing readers. Research has also endorsed the debilitative impact of phonological distance on letter naming (Asaad & Eviatar, 2013) and on phonological memory in typically developing and in children with developmental language disorder (Saiegh- Haddad & Ghawi-Dakwar, 2017). Altogether, the results from these studies suggest difficulty among Arabic-speaking children in developing high-quality phonological representations for StA words.…”

“…Note that the unique words used in the current study were a combination of unique words encoding StA phonemes and those not encoding StA phonemes. Earlier research has shown that unique words that do not encode StA phonemes are easier to process in memory (using a nonword repetition task) than unique words that do not encode StA phonemes (Saiegh-Haddad & Ghawi-Dakwar, 2017). This factor may turn out to be important in clarifying some of the underlying differences in phonological representation between cognates and different types of unique words, and is a question is for future research to pursue.…”

Diglossia in the Etiology of Schizophrenia

“…In parallel, several studies have reported schizophrenia-related reading deficits (Whitford et al, 2018), including those implicated in diglossia, such as impaired phonological awareness (Revheim et al, 2006). Similarly, diglossia and schizophrenia have both been separately associated with the reduced ability in performing word and nonword repetition tasks (Farnam et al, 2015;Saiegh-Haddad and Ghawi-Dakwar, 2017), implying a common deficit in verbal working memory. A working memory dysfunction is proposed to be a fundamental impairment leading to thought disorder in schizophrenia (Deserno et al, 2012;Goldman-Rakic, 1994).…”

Noncolloquial Arabic in Tunisian Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Possible Instance of Language Acquisition in a Noninteractive Context

“…Children also have difficulties in recognizing the MSA phonemes that are absent from their colloquial varieties, and the production of such MSA phonemes is considerably delayed (Amayreh, 2003;Saiegh-Haddad, 2007;Saiegh-Haddad, Levin, Hende, & Ziv, 2011). Phonological distance between MSA and colloquial varieties also impacts word and nonword repetition both in typically developing children and in children with specific language impairment (Saiegh-Haddad & Ghawi-Dakwar, 2017). In the same vein, a forced-choice grammaticality judgement study in Palestinian Arabic strongly suggested that full mastery of morphosyntactic structures of MSA was still not in place at the fifth grade (Khamis-Dakwar, Froud, & Gordon, 2012).…”