School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, United Kingdom.
Department of Audiology and Speech Therapy, Birzeit University, Ramallah, Palestinian Territories.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2021 Feb 17;64(2):561-578. doi: 10.1044/2020_JSLHR-19-00292. Epub 2021 Feb 4.
Purpose This study investigated the production of tense and subject-verb agreement in Palestinian Arabic-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD) in comparison to their typically developing (TD) peers in terms of (a) performance accuracy and (b) error patterns. Method Participants were 14 children with DLD aged 4;0-7;10 and 32 TD children aged 3;0-8;0 matched on nonverbal abilities. Children were asked to complete a picture-based verb elicitation task. The task was designed to measure the production accuracy of tense and subject-verb agreement inflections in Arabic. Results The DLD group scored significantly lower than the TD group on the verb elicitation task. The DLD group was significantly less accurate than the TD group in marking tense, specifically present tense. They were also less accurate in marking agreement in general, with specific difficulty in using feminine verb forms. The DLD and TD groups differed in their tense error patterns, but not in agreement error patterns. Conclusions The acquisition of verb morphology in Palestinian Arabic-speaking children with DLD appears to be delayed and possibly different from their TD peers. The DLD group found the production of marked verb forms more challenging than less marked ones. These results are discussed in light of the structural characteristics of Arabic. Future studies would need to include larger sample sizes; investigate other aspects of verb morphology, including both production and comprehension; include other language domains; and consider longitudinal designs to provide more in-depth knowledge of Arabic language acquisition.
本研究旨在比较巴勒斯坦阿拉伯语发展性语言障碍（DLD）儿童与典型发育（TD）儿童在（a）表现准确性和（b）错误模式方面的时态和主谓一致的产生。
参与者为 14 名 4 岁零 7 个月至 7 岁零 10 个月的 DLD 儿童和 32 名 3 岁零 0 个月至 8 岁零 0 个月的非言语能力匹配的 TD 儿童。要求儿童完成基于图片的动词引出任务。该任务旨在衡量阿拉伯语中时态和主谓一致屈折形式的产生准确性。
DLD 组在动词引出任务中的得分明显低于 TD 组。DLD 组在标记时态，特别是现在时态方面的准确性明显低于 TD 组。他们在标记一般一致性方面也不够准确，特别是在使用阴性动词形式方面有困难。DLD 组和 TD 组在时态错误模式上存在差异，但在一致性错误模式上没有差异。
巴勒斯坦阿拉伯语 DLD 儿童的动词形态习得似乎延迟，且与 TD 同龄人可能不同。DLD 组发现产生标记动词形式比非标记动词形式更具挑战性。这些结果是根据阿拉伯语的结构特征来讨论的。未来的研究需要包括更大的样本量；调查动词形态的其他方面，包括产生和理解；包括其他语言领域；并考虑纵向设计，以提供更深入的阿拉伯语习得知识。
