The impact of morphological density on reading comprehension in Arabic: A comparison between typically developing and children with reading disabilities.

This study examined the influence of morphological density on reading comprehension in Arabic and whether this influence differs between typical and children with reading disabilities. Morphological density in Arabic is a text feature that refers to using bound morphemes, creating dense words with more morphemes. The participants were 182 fifth-graders, both typical and children with reading disabilities. Children were assessed in reading comprehension by reading texts with low- or high-morphological density. Findings revealed that overall morphological density impacted reading comprehension performance. That is, scores were found to be higher while reading low-density text than high-density text. Moreover, an interaction of morphological density condition by reading proficiency showed no density text effect among typical developing readers. However, a difference was obtained in the children with reading disabilities whereas low-morphological density text score was higher than the score of high-morphological density text. The study highlights the importance of morphological awareness in reading comprehension in Arabic, extending that morphological density plays an important role in this process. The results are discussed in light of the lexical quality hypothesis and simple view of reading model. The findings imply the need of explicit morphological instruction for dense morphological forms.

The Impact of Diglossia on Inflectional Morphological Constructions and Their Relation to Literacy Skills: A Longitudinal Study.

PURPOSE: This study examined the differences in spoken Arabic (SpA) and standard Arabic (StA) in inflectional (gender, number, possessive pronouns, and tense) construction use in Arabic among preschoolers. Moreover, we tested the contribution of the inflectional constructions possessed in kindergarten to reading skills in the first grade and examined whether this morphological contribution differs between SpA and StA. METHOD: We assessed 261 Arabic-speaking kindergartners for 1 year until the end of first grade for inflectional knowledge in kindergarten and reading skills in first grade (reading accuracy and fluency, spelling, and reading comprehension). RESULTS: The findings revealed that among inflections, prevalence of performance on gender constructions was the highest, followed by number and possessive pronouns, and lowest performance for tense constructions. Although the performance for SpA was higher than for StA in all constructions, similar patterns were observed except similarity between gender and number in StA. Moreover, the results indicate a significant contribution of almost all inflectional constructions (except possessive pronouns) possessed in kindergarten to all reading skills in the first grade. However, tense did not contribute to reading comprehension, and possessive pronouns did not contribute to any of the reading measures. Regarding diglossia, although the claims that linguistic components in StA are not represented in the mental lexicon, StA accounted for an additional significant 2%-3% of the explained variance in Step 2 (which checked the practical significance of statistically significant results) in all reading measures. CONCLUSIONS: This study highlights the impact of diglossia-specific morphological differences (prevalence of the use of the morphological construction in Arabic in SpA vs. StA) on reading and literacy measures, especially the contribution of morphological awareness in SpA, which may provide a stronger basis for StA reading skills. The implications of these results are discussed, especially regarding exposing children to the morphological representations of both the SpA and StA forms to promote reading and literacy in Arabic.

Children's Command of Four Inflectional Constructions in Arabic: Differences and Development With Age.

PURPOSE: This study examines whether differences in acquisition exist among the inflectional constructions of number, gender, possessive pronouns, and tense. Moreover, the study investigates whether these inflectional patterns develop with age. METHOD: The participants were 1,020 Arabic-speaking kindergartners from K2 and K3. Children were assessed in morphological tasks, which targeted four different morphological inflectional constructions both in real words and pseudowords: gender, number-plural, possessive pronouns, and tense. RESULTS: Findings reveal the differences between all inflectional constructions. In other words, children demonstrated higher performance in gender construction, followed by construction of numbers and possessive pronouns, while the lowest performance is shown among tense construction. In addition, the results indicate that all inflectional constructions develop with age, that is, there was higher performance in K3 than in K2 in all inflection constructions. CONCLUSIONS: This study contributes to our knowledge about early language development by showing that the acquisition of gender and number-plurals is faster and more advanced than the acquisition of possessive pronouns or tense. The implications of these results are discussed, especially the need to develop children's inflectional forms such as possessive pronouns and tense, which may eventually also impact narrative understanding and production.

The impact of Diglossia-Effect on Reading Acquisition Among Arabic-Speaking Children: A Longitudinal Study.

Arabic is a diglossic language, where two language varieties are used: spoken Arabic (SpA) and standard Arabic (StA). The words may be "identical" (maintaining the same phonological expression in the SpA and StA) or "unique" to StA). This study examined the effect of diglossia on reading according to the lexical distance between the SpA and StA forms and whether this influence changes with age. The participants were 137 first-graders that were followed to the second grade. The findings indicated a significant effect of grade level with higher performance in the second grade. A significant association was obtained between the lexical distance and reading accuracy and rate with better performance for identical than unique items across grade levels. No significant interaction between lexical distance and grade level was found. The results indicate the contribution of reading unique and identical forms in the first grade to reading in the second grade. The advantage in reading identical among unique words is discussed in light of the lexical quality hypothesis and dual-route model. The implications of these results were discussed in the context of diglossia, especially the need for StA oral language enrichment at the preschool level.