Emergent literacy skills of Saudi Arabic speaking children with and without developmental language disorder

Clin Linguist Phon. 2021 Jul 26:1-18. doi: 10.1080/02699206.2021.1955299. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTResearch with English-speaking populations has shown that there is a relationship between developmental language disorder (DLD) and emergent literacy skills in children. A small number of Arabic studies have indirectly investigated this relationship in typically developing (TD) children, and children with reading difficulties, and demonstrated the important role of morphosyntactic skills in Arabic reading acquisition. However, none of the previous work has examined the relationship between oral language and emergent literacy skills in children with and without DLD. The aims of this study are twofold: to investigate the language and emergent literacy skills of Saudi Arabic children with DLD aged between 4;0- 6;11 years of age; to compare their performance to age and socioeconomic status matched TD children, and to investigate the relationship between language and emergent literacy skills in both groups. A comprehensive Arabic language and emergent literacy battery was administered. Findings demonstrated that the TD group significantly outperformed the DLD group on most emergent literacy tasks. The DLD group was significantly less accurate than TD group on syllable segmentation, and phoneme awareness skills. There were significant associations between oral language skills and emergent literacy skills in the DLD group. In TD group, vocabulary knowledge and syntactic skills wer...
Source: Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Source Type: research