A large linguistic distance exists between spoken Arabic and the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) the literary language (a diglosia). Novice readers, therefore, struggle with the complex orthography of Arabic as well as the mastering of MSA. Here, we tested whether structured activities in MSA would advance kindergarteners' MSA aptitude by the end of…

Children's ability to distinguish between the text (what was said) and the intentional structure (what was meant) was interrogated by means of verbatim and paraphrase questions in two types of discourse: narratives and nursery rhymes. (Author/VWL)