Verb agreement production in Arabic-speaking children with developmental language disorder

ABSTRACT

Verb morphology difficulties have been widely attested in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) who speak English and other languages. This research contributes data on a variety of Arabic, a richly inflected Semitic language. The current study examined the production of subject-verb agreement morphology in three groups of 30 monolingual Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children. Ten preschoolers diagnosed with DLD (M = 4;4 years) were compared to two groups of typically developing (TD) controls —10 language-matched (TD-LA) (M = 2;7 years) and 10 chronological age-matched (TD-CA) (M = 4;5 years). To elicit target productions, an action video depicting a total of 33 randomly ordered third-person verb stimuli (12 feminine singular, 9 masculine singular, and 12 plurals) was presented. The results confirmed significant differences in the correct use of third-person verb (gender and number) agreement between the children with DLD and the two comparison groups. The DLD group was more proficient with masculine forms than with feminine or plural markings. Qualitative error analyses revealed that this group had a proclivity to overgeneralize the masculine for other agreement markings. The findings are discussed in relation to relevant theories of typical and impaired language acquisition. The implications for assessing and treating verb morphological deficits are highlighted.

Acknowledgments

We extend a special gratitude to the children who participated in this study and the speech-language pathologists for facilitating the project. Likewise, we thank former students from the department of Communication Disorders Sciences at Kuwait University for assistance with data rendering.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Declaration of Interest Statement

The authors report there are no competing financial or nonfinancial interests to declare for this study.

Data Availability Statement

While the experimental stimuli are available on request from the corresponding author [FA], the supporting data is not accessible due to parental objections to share their children’s data publicly.

Additional information

Funding

We wish to acknowledge funding for this project from Kuwait University (Project number WC01/07).