Expressive Verb Morphology Deficits in Arabic-Speaking Children With Developmental Language Disorder

Abstract

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.

Sentence Repetition as a Clinical Marker of Developmental Language Disorder: Evidence From Arabic

“…The DLD group had lower accuracy scores compared to the TD group in producing past tense and present tense verbs. This finding confirms that the production of verb tense and subject-verb agreement morphology is a weakness for Arabic-speaking children with DLD (Abdallah & Crago, 2008;Fahim, 2017;Taha et al, 2021). The children with DLD in our sample repeated noun plurals and possessive pronouns with high accuracy (> 90%), suggesting that these structures were not problematic for them.…”

“…Main agreement errors were the use of second-person plural verbs in place of third-person verbs (in cases where the imperative was used) or the use of singular verbs instead of plural verbs. These errors were barely produced by the TD group, suggesting that they are age-inappropriate errors; however, such errors have been observed in Arabic-speaking children with DLD and toddler TD children (Abdallah & Crago, 2008;Ouali, 2018;Qasem & Sircar, 2017;Taha et al, 2021).…”

“…Arabic-speaking children with DLD have difficulties with verb morphology production (e.g., Abdallah & Crago, 2008;Fahim, 2017;Taha et al, 2021). In a recent study, Taha et al (2021) reported that 4-to 7-year-old Palestinian Arabic-speaking children with DLD were significantly less accurate than their age-matched TD peers in producing the following forms: past tense masculine singular verbs (e.g., daras, study-PAST-3MS, "he studies"), past tense feminine singular morpheme -at (e.g., darasat, study-PAST-3FS, "she studied"), past tense plural morpheme -u (e.g., darasu, study-PAST-3PL, "they studies"), present tense masculine singular morpheme byi-(e.g., byidrus, study-PRES-3MS, "he is studying"), present tense feminine singular morpheme bti-(e.g., btidrus, study-PRES-3FS, " she is studying"), and present tense plural circumfix morpheme byi-u (e.g., byidrusu, study-PRES-3PL, "they are studying"). The tense errors of the DLD group resembled the use of finite (i.e., wrong tense) or nonfinite/tenseless forms (i.e., imperative and imperfective verbs) in place of the correct tense.…”

“…Although existing findings on the morphosyntactic difficulties in Arabic DLD are informative, they remain preliminary. Most of the studies included small numbers of children with DLD (e.g., N = 14 in Faquih, 2014, andTaha et al, 2021;N = 12 in Abdallah et al, 2013;and N = 10 in Abdallah & Crago, 2008). In some studies, the number of items used to examine the target grammatical structures was very limited (e.g., object relatives and passives in Shaalan's, 2010, study were only assessed using one item each).…”

“…According to Marinis and Armon-Lotem (2015), SR tasks should include grammatical constructions that are vulnerable for children with DLD in the target language (i.e., language specific) and syntactically complex structures, which are problematic for children with DLD across languages (i.e., language-independent structures). Based on the available research on DLD in Arabic, the language-specific structures were tense and verb agreement morphology (Abdallah & Crago, 2008;Fahim, 2017;Taha et al, 2021), noun plural morphology (Abdallah et al, 2013), and bound possessive pronouns (Faquih, 2014). The language-independent structures were syntactically complex sentences and included passives, sentences with CLD, object wh-questions, subject and object relative clause, sentences with subordination, and conditionals.…”