Arabic morpheme per utterance: a morphological measure of child language development in spoken Arabic

ABSTRACT

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 typically developing (TD) Arabic-speaking preschoolers aged 2;6 to 5;0. We report here on the internal consistency of Arabic-MPU against different types of elicitation procedures, and its external validity. We show that the new tool is developmentally sensitive and hence can be utilized for the assessment of the language growth in Spoken Arabic. This new tool should contribute to further research and development of measures for language assessment. In addition, it can be used for language screening in preschoolers for the purpose of identifying young speakers of Arabic who exhibit delays in early language development.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Although the epithet ‘colloquial’ is more widespread in the study of Arabic, the term is often used in a judgmental or even condescending tone compared to the standard language, and we therefore prefer resorting to the term “vernacular,” whose usage in literature is more neutral in that respect.

² The participants have not studied either Standard Arabic, or any second language, though they were exposed to some aural input of MSA through children’s books (read to them) and some television programs. As an ethnic minority in Israel, Israeli Arabs’ first exposure to Hebrew—the majority language—occurs at the second grade of Primary school, but not earlier, because they live in a sort of cultural autonomy: rural Arab children live only in Arabic, they consume children’s TV programs on Israeli Arabic-speaking mass media, and their entire lives revolve around their communities.

³ The Northern Triangle area comprises Kufur Qara’, Ar’ara, Baqa-Jatt and Umm al-Faḥm. The Triangle area is the residence of only members of the Palestinian Arab minority of Israel; for more information about this ethnic minority from the point of view of language and education, see Amara & Mar’i (2002).

⁴ More detailed rules for calculating Arabic-MPU scores appear in the Appendix.

⁵ Unlike English and other modern languages, second person pronouns are marked for gender (and number) in most Semitic languages, including Arabic and Hebrew.

⁶ The slash symbol is used here as the division sign ÷, that is, ‘per’.

⁷ Once this article is published, the scoring table will be adapted for the publication of a booklet in Arabic for clinical intervention among other Arabic-speaking communities.