"Speech Is Golden": The Importance of Colloquial Arabic for Reading Standard Arabic for Beginning Readers.

PURPOSE: We investigated the role of spoken language in the acquisition of literacy in the context of Arabic diglossia, where the written language, Standard Arabic, deviates substantially from the spoken language, Colloquial Arabic, children acquire naturally from birth. METHOD: The participants (N = 110; 40 girls) were Saudi Arabic-speaking children in Grades 2-4. Children completed assessments of oral paragraph reading and word decoding using a vowelized script. They also completed three spoken assessments of Colloquial Arabic, which include sentence comprehension, sentence completion, and pragmatic knowledge, as well as a test of phonological awareness. We used path analysis to investigate the contributions of each of the spoken language indicators, decoding, and phonological awareness to reading comprehension (RC) in single and multiple serial mediator models. RESULTS: We found that spoken language (i.e., sentence comprehension, sentence completion, and pragmatic knowledge) and word decoding uniquely contributed to RC. Moreover, word decoding mediated the association between spoken language and RC. The path from spoken language to phonological awareness, then to word decoding, and finally to RC was inconclusive. CONCLUSIONS: While most studies on literacy acquisition in the context of Arabic diglossia focus on the linguistic distance between the colloquial (spoken) and the standard (written) language varieties, our results highlight the important contribution of spoken language skills to reading skills in Arabic despite this linguistic gap. The important implication of these findings is that spoken language interventions aimed at boosting children's narrative language skills in their home language (Colloquial Arabic) are an important tool for building a foundation for literacy in diglossia contexts.

Assessing language development in Arabic: The Arabic language: Evaluation of function (ALEF).

Arabic is characterized by extensive dialectal variation, diglossia, and substantial morphological complexity. Arabic lacks comprehensive diagnostic tools that would allow for a systematic evaluation of its development, critical for the early identification of language difficulties in the spoken and written domains. To address this gap, we have developed an assessment battery called Arabic Language: Evaluation of Function (ALEF), aimed at children aged 3 to 11 years. ALEF consists of 17 subtests indexing different language domains, modalities, and associated skills and representational systems. We administered the ALEF battery to native Gulf Arabic-speaking children (n = 467; ages 2.5 to 10.92; 55% boys; 20 children in each 6-month age band) in Saudi Arabia in two data collection waves. Analyses examining the psychometric properties of the instrument indicated that after the removal of misfitting items, the ALEF subtests had reliability coefficients in the range from 0.78 to 0.98, and resulting subtest scores displayed a consistent profile of positive intercorrelations and age effects. Taken together, the results indicate that the ALEF battery has good psychometric properties, and can be used for the purpose of evaluating early language development in Gulf Arabic speaking children, pending further refinement of the test structure, examination of gender-related differential item functioning, and norming.

Narrative Language Markers of Arabic Language Development and Impairment.

Purpose We examined indices of narrative microstructure as metrics of language development and impairment in Arabic-speaking children. We examined their age sensitivity, correlations with standardized measures, and ability to differentiate children with average language and language impairment. Method We collected story narratives from 177 children (54.2% boys) between 3.08 and 10.92 years old (M = 6.25, SD = 1.67) divided into six age bands. Each child also received standardized measures of spoken language (Receptive and Expressive Vocabulary, Sentence Imitation, and Pseudoword Repetition). Several narrative indices of microstructure were examined in each age band. Children were divided into (suspected) developmental language disorder and typical language groups using the standardized test scores and compared on the narrative indicators. Sensitivity and specificity of the narrative indicators that showed group differences were calculated. Results The measures that showed age sensitivity included subject omission error rate, number of object clitics, correct use of subject-verb agreement, and mean length of utterance in words. The developmental language disorder group scored higher on subject omission errors (Cohen's d = 0.55) and lower on correct use of subject-verb agreement (Cohen's d = 0.48) than the typical language group. The threshold for impaired performance with the highest combination of specificity and sensitivity was 35th percentile. Conclusions Several indices of narrative microstructure appear to be valid metrics for documenting language development in children acquiring Gulf Arabic. Subject omission errors and correct use of subject-verb agreement differentiate children with typical and atypical levels of language development.

Orthographic processing is a key predictor of reading fluency in good and poor readers in a transparent orthography.

We used structural equation modeling to investigate sources of individual differences in oral reading fluency in a transparent orthography, Russian. Phonological processing, orthographic processing, and rapid automatized naming were used as independent variables, each derived from a combination of two scores: phonological awareness and pseudoword repetition, spelling and orthographic choice, and rapid serial naming of letters and digits, respectively. The contribution of these to oral text-reading fluency was evaluated as a direct relationship and via two mediators, decoding accuracy and unitized reading, measured with a single-word oral reading test. The participants were "good" and "poor" readers, i.e., those with reading skills above the 90th and below the 10th percentiles (n = 1,344, grades 2-6, St. Petersburg, Russia). In both groups, orthographic processing skills significantly contributed to fluency and unitized reading, but not to decoding accuracy. Phonological processing skills did not contribute directly to reading fluency in either group, while contributing to decoding accuracy and, to a lesser extent, to unitized reading. With respect to the roles of decoding accuracy and unitized reading, the results for good and poor readers diverged: in good readers, unitized reading, but not decoding accuracy, was significantly related to reading fluency. For poor readers, decoding accuracy (measured as pseudoword decoding) was related to reading fluency, but unitized reading was not. These results underscore the importance of orthographic skills for reading fluency even in an orthography with consistent phonology-to-orthography correspondences. They also point to a qualitative difference in the reading strategies of good and poor readers.