Purpose: This study examines whether differences in acquisition exist among the inflectional constructions of number, gender, possessive pronouns, and tense. Moreover, the study investigates whether these inflectional patterns develop with age. Method: The participants were 1,020 Arabic-speaking kindergartners from K2 and K3. Children were…

The objective of this study was to examine the development of derivational morphological structures in the productive language of Kuwaiti Arabic (KA)-speaking children. Participants were 512 typically developing Kuwaiti children aged 3;0 years to 7;11 years (243 boys and 269 girls). Five age groups at 1-year intervals were tested; each group was…

This study investigated the acquisition of word-patterns and roots in the nominal system of the spoken language of Palestinian Arabic (PA) and its distance from Standard Arabic (StA). It described, analyzed, and quantified the nominal system (roots and word-patterns) as reflected in the language corpus of Palestinian-Arab kindergarteners 3 to 6…

Given the rich bound morphology of Spoken Arabic, an attempt was made here to construct a developmental measure corresponding to the mean length utterance (MLU) in English and to morpheme-per-utterance (MPU) in Hebrew. The adaptation to Arabic resulted in a new measurement termed Arabic-MPU, that was experimentally tested on a sample of 98…

Purpose: Children make spelling errors despite classroom instruction on phoneme-grapheme connections and spelling rules. We examined whether additional practice helps to decrease the number of spelling errors for a morphological spelling rule. We distinguished explicit practice in applying a spelling rule from implicit exposure to correct word…

Spelling poses a challenge to Arabic-speaking learners due to the complexity of the morphological and orthographic systems in Arabic. Arabic morphology has been argued to play a critical role in spelling since its morphological operations are built on a system consisting of a root that is interlocking into different patterns of vowels to form…

The study explored the inflectional morphological awareness of Greek-speaking poor comprehenders identified in grade 3. The sample consisted of 13 poor comprehenders and 27 good comprehenders. The poor comprehenders were selected from 126 children attended 19 primary schools in metropolitan area of Athens using a cut-off-based approach. All the…

A substantial body of research has noted morphological priming effects in visual word recognition in deep orthographies, but it is still unclear whether similar effects exist in transparent orthographies. In the present experiment, we investigated the development of morphological decomposition in visual word recognition in the phonologically…

This study sought to explore the advanced lexicon, one of the hallmarks of text quality. To this end, we analysed the advanced lexicon deployed in the production of two types of texts -- a descriptive and an argumentative -- by Hebrew-speaking school children. Our study had two goals, the first to trace the developmental path of the use of…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of a technology-based intervention (LanguageLinks: Syntax Assessment and Intervention®; Laureate Learning Systems, Inc., 2013) to improve reading comprehension for d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) elementary students. The intervention was a self-paced, interactive program designed to…

The study explored the inflectional morphological awareness of Greek-speaking children with dyslexia in grade 3. The sample consisted of 24 dyslexic children and 32 chronological age-matched typically developing readers. All participants completed two oral experimental tasks of inflectional morphological awareness (i.e., verb inflections and…

The study investigated the impact of language impairment and environmental deprivation on Hebrew morpho-lexical development across the school years. Participants were 659 grade school and middle school Hebrew-speaking students--typically developing and language impaired, from mid-high and from low socio-economic status (SES). They were all…

Several studies on children and adults with and without linguistic impairment have reported differences between verb and noun processing. The present study assessed whether noun and verb bases affect differently children's reading of derived words. Thirty-six Italian good readers and 18 poor readers, all 4th or 5th graders, were asked to read…

How to help babies and young children right from birth to become competent in talking as well as emergent literacy is illustrated by research findings as well as with specific clinical stories. Both kinds of knowledge can serve to galvanize parents and teachers to increase awareness of infant and preschool language development and the crucial role…

When asked to "find three forks", adult speakers of English use the noun "fork" to identify units for counting. However, when number words (e.g. "three") and quantifiers (e.g. "more", "every") are used with unfamiliar words ("Give me three blickets") noun-specific conceptual criteria are unavailable for picking out units. This poses a problem for…