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EnAbstract Background Pragmatics, the use of language in context, has been investigated only recently in the language of children who stutter. Some investigators have begun to address how the language and fluency of stuttering are influenced in different communicative settings. Some recent data have suggested that there may be a propensity for a delay or differences in certain areas of language learning for children who stutter compared with normal fluent children, specifically in vocabulary, pragmatic, or syntax development. Aim The aim of this study was to assess pragmatic skills in Egyptian Arabic-speaking children who stutter and to determine the relation between stuttering and the pragmatic aspect of language for future planning of a pragmatic-focused rehabilitation program for children who stutter. Participants and methods The sample in this study included 20 Egyptian Arabic-speaking children diagnosed to have stuttering and 20 children with normally developed language who spoke fluently. Both groups were of average intelligence; their age ranged between 4 and 7 years. All were from the same socioeconomic strata and were selected from the outpatient clinic Kasr El-Aini Hospital. All participants were subjected to a pragmatic assessment and language assessment applied in the Phoniatric Unit, Kasr El-Aini hospital. Results Scores of pragmatic skills were significantly lower in the stuttering group than the control group, except in object function skills. Preverbal communication skills decreased with increasing degree of stuttering and with an increase in Bloodstein stages of stuttering. Otherwise, other pragmatic skills showed no linear correlation with increasing degree of stuttering severity or an increase in Bloodstein stages of stuttering Conclusion Scores of pragmatic skills were significantly deficient in the stuttering group. All this should be considered during planning of a rehabilitation program for stuttering.

EnAbstract Background Psycholinguistics or the psychology of language refers to the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language. Objectives This work aimed at designing and applying an Arabic Psycholinguistic Screening Tool on a group of native Egyptian students aged 7 through 9, 11 years old, enrolled in primary grade 1 through primary grade 4, and analyzing the obtained results in order to attain a better understanding of psycholinguistic skills in the studied age range and preliminarily study the constituent items of the tool. Participants and methods The sample in this study included 45 healthy native Arabic-speaking Egyptian children: 25 boys and 20 girls. The groups were as follows: group I (from 7 to 7; 11 years old), group II (from 8 to 8; 11 years old), and group III (from 9 to 9; 11 years old). They were attending regular classes in schools following the Egyptian Arabic National curriculum. The participants were enrolled in primary grade 1 through primary grade 4. Children were randomly selected from a cluster of children reported to be subjectively free from any hearing difficulties, delayed language development, medical problems, and intellectual, social, psychiatric, psychological, or serious academic difficulties. Psycholinguistic abilities for each child were evaluated using the Arabic Psycholinguistic Screening Tool designed in the current study. Tested parameters included oral similarity, morphological closure, proper word and nonsense word repetition, phonological deletion, phonological rhyming awareness and production, spoken and written vocabulary, sequencing events, sight and sound decoding, in addition to sight and sound spelling. The results obtained were then analyzed using descriptive, comparative, correlation, reliability, and validity studies. Results The results reflected internal consistency as well as the content, construct, and convergent validity of the Psycholinguistic Screening Tool for children aged 7 through 9; 11 years for those items covering oral similarity, morphological closure, proper word repetition, spoken and written vocabulary, proper word repetition, spoken and written vocabulary, sequencing of events, sight and sound decoding, and sound spelling. Although nonsense word repetition, sight spelling, phonological rhyming awareness, and production subtests were found to have convergent validity as well as internal consistency, statistical studies did not quite prove their construct validity. Conclusion and recommendations (a) The phonological rhyming awareness and production as well as nonsense word repetition and sight spelling subtests should be revised taking into consideration the Arabic educational curriculum applied in Egyptian schools. (b) Further studies should be carried out on the Arabic Screening Tool to study predictive validity on a larger group of children. (c) Studies should be carried out using the Arabic Psycholinguistic Screening Tool on a group of children with learning disabilities to examine its diagnostic sensitivity.

EnAbstract Background Prosody is the aspect of language that conveys emotion by changes in tone, rhythm, and emphasis during speech. Prosody includes aspects such as intonation and tone of voice. Specific language impairment (SLI) is a developmental disorder in which language development is below the chronological age despite normal nonverbal intelligence and no obvious neurological or physiological impairments or emotional and/or social difficulties that could impact language use. Most of these children experience considerable difficulty in language comprehension and/or production and experience specific problems in learning syntactic rules. In the speech stream, boundaries of major syntactic constituents are reliably marked by prosodic cues. Although deficits in related aspects of prosody have been hypothesized to underlie SLI, prosody has been little studied in Egyptian children having SLIs. Objective The objective of this work was to assess prosody in Egyptian children with an SLI in order to correlate the results with the clinical profile of the patients so as to choose the proper rehabilitation training program. Participants and method This study included 30 Egyptian children with SLIs and 30 normal children as a control group; their ages ranged between 4 and 6 years. Assessment included language assessment using the Arabic language test and prosodic assessment using the protocol of prosodic assessment, which was especially designed to assess prosodic abilities in Arabic-speaking children. Results Results revealed a significant difference in most of the individual and total subjective scores of prosodic skills between the control group and children with SLIs. Although the difference in the average of the total objective scores of prosodic assessment, which included pitch and energy, was highly significant, the average of total sentence duration was insignificant. There was significant correlation between the total language age and all subjective scores and an insignificant correlation with the total objective scores of prosodic assessment skills in SLI children. Conclusion SLI children have defective receptive, expressive, subjective, and objective scores of prosodic assessment skills that should be considered during the rehabilitation program for language stimulation for these children.