Purpose: This study aimed to evaluate the stability of phonological awareness (PA) and language achievements between kindergarten and first grade among Arabic-speaking children. Method: A total of 1,158 children were assessed in PA and language skills in both grades and were classified based on distinct and integrated achievements on PA and…

Purpose: The study tested macro- and microstructure narrative skills in kindergarten Arabic-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and in age-matched children with typical language development (TLD). Specifically, it compared narrative skills in the two groups of children in two story modes: storytelling in Spoken Arabic…

Reading instruction for young Arabic speakers presents challenges for textbook publishers and teachers. In the present study, the authors conduct an analysis at the word level of four multidisciplinary textbooks for reading instruction in grades one and two in Egypt. The study sought to answer the following questions: What are the most common…

Purpose: The main aim of the current study was to examine the longitudinal impact of verb inflectional distance on morphological awareness among Arabic-speaking children from kindergarten (K) to third grade. The study also investigated the impact of testing children in two language varieties, Spoken Palestinian dialect (SPD) and Modern Standard…

Exploring the relationships between different linguistic skills is essential for linguistics and interventional studies on language disorders. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between phonological skills, non-phonological skills (including vocabulary, morphological and syntax awareness), and basic literacy ability (including letter…

Reading acquisition in Arabic presents unique challenges, notably due to its complex morphological structure and the diglossic nature of the language. The discrepancy between written (Modern Standard) and spoken Arabic poses significant barriers for learners, particularly in decoding morphologically complex words. This study explored the role of…

Many second language (L2) students in Sweden struggle with reading in Swedish. There needs to be more research on how L2 students with weak word decoding skills in Swedish could be individually supported. Therefore, the current study examined the impact of a systematic and intensive word decoding intervention in Swedish among individual L2…

This study investigates the role of diglossic and orthographic features in reading comprehension in Arabic. Specifically, it probes the independent contribution of language, metalinguistic, and decoding skills in the spoken language and in Standard Arabic to reading comprehension in the "abjad" writing system of Arabic. A sample of 112…

Purpose: Word learning requires the creation of phonological and semantic representations and links in long-term memory. Phonological distance of a given word from the spoken language affects children's lexical-phonological representations and processing. The study investigates the role of the phonological distance of Modern Standard Arabic (StA)…

We examined the role of morphological processing in the reading of inflections and derivations in Arabic, a morphologically-rich language, among 228 first-graders and 230 second-graders. All words were morphologically complex, with differences in number of morphemes and morphological transparency. Inflections consisted of three morphemes, with…

Fine motor skills (FMS) are among the most studied nonlinguistic factors influencing early literacy acquisition. Although developmental studies have often supported the presence of a relationship between FMS and emergent literacy, the underlying mechanisms have not always been adequately explored. In this study, we used structural equation…

The current study examined the effect of the linguistic status of the verbal previewing strategy on the outcomes of reading comprehension tasks among second (N = 25, age 7.08 ± 0.3), and sixth-grade students (N = 25, age 11.75 ± 0.25), with typical reading development. The texts for each group were carefully matched and were divided into three…

Studies have suggested that multiple features influence letter knowledge across different orthographies. Arabic offers a unique opportunity to investigate the relations of letter properties on letter knowledge, but research on Arabic letter knowledge is scarce. This study was designed to investigate (a) letter frequency, (b) letter sequence, (c)…

This study analyses the impact of certain cognitive processes on the writing of words in languages with different orthographic consistency (Spanish and Arabic) in the first and second years of Primary Education. One hundred twenty-eight schoolchildren from Ecuador and 109 from Algiers participated in this study. All the participants were aged…

This study aims to identify the phonological error patterns of normally developing children who speak colloquial Jordanian Arabic dialect and to provide normative data for the age of suppression for each phonological error pattern. One hundred fifty-four normally developing children (68 females and 86 males) ranging from 3 to 6.5 years were…