Joubran-Awadie Nancy, Shalhoub-Awwad Yasmin
Department of Learning Disabilities, Faculty of Education, and Edmond J. Safra Brain Research Center for the Study of Learning Disabilities, University of Haifa, Israel.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2025 Mar 26;68(3S):1424-1440. doi: 10.1044/2024_JSLHR-23-00456. Epub 2024 Apr 5.
The main aim of the current study was to examine the longitudinal impact of verb inflectional distance on morphological awareness among Arabic-speaking children from kindergarten (K) to third grade. The study also investigated the impact of testing children in two language varieties, Spoken Palestinian dialect (SPD) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), on the development of morphological awareness.
Sixty-two children were followed longitudinally at three time points: K, Grade 1 (G1), and Grade 3 (G3). Each child completed two parallel orally administered inflectional awareness pseudoverb tasks in the spoken and in the standard variety at each grade. The items were classified by form and function into two main distance levels: low-diglossic and high-diglossic, representing the closest and the farthest distance between SPD and MSA morphemes, respectively.
The findings indicated that morphological awareness was more difficult for high-diglossic morphemes than for low-diglossic ones. Moreover, the findings point to different paths in the developmental trajectory of verb inflectional awareness by distance levels and language variety: In SPD, the difference in children's awareness between low-diglossic morphemes and high-diglossic morphemes decreased across grades and disappeared in G3, whereas, in MSA, this difference significantly increased from K to G1 and G3.
These findings demonstrate the substantial impact of verb inflectional distance on morphological awareness development before and during the initial process of learning to read. Results are discussed within the context of linguistic distance and the development of metalinguistic processing skills with implications for assessment and intervention.
本研究的主要目的是考察动词屈折变化距离对阿拉伯语儿童从幼儿园到三年级形态意识的纵向影响。该研究还调查了用两种语言变体——巴勒斯坦口语方言（SPD）和现代标准阿拉伯语（MSA）对儿童进行测试，对形态意识发展的影响。
对62名儿童在三个时间点进行纵向跟踪：幼儿园、一年级（G1）和三年级（G3）。每个孩子在每个年级都要完成两个平行的口语形式的屈折变化意识伪动词任务，分别用口语和标准语变体进行。这些项目按形式和功能分为两个主要距离水平：低双言和高双言，分别代表SPD和MSA语素之间最近和最远的距离。
研究结果表明，高双言语素的形态意识比低双言语素更难。此外，研究结果还指出了动词屈折变化意识发展轨迹中，按距离水平和语言变体的不同路径：在SPD中，低双言语素和高双言语素之间儿童意识的差异在各年级逐渐减小，并在三年级消失，而在MSA中，这种差异从幼儿园到一年级和三年级显著增加。
这些研究结果表明，动词屈折变化距离对阅读学习初始过程之前和期间的形态意识发展有重大影响。研究结果将在语言距离和元语言加工技能发展的背景下进行讨论，并对评估和干预具有启示意义。
