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…

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)…

Arabic is a diglossic language, where two language varieties are used: spoken Arabic (SpA) and standard Arabic (StA). The words may be "identical" (maintaining the same phonological expression in the SpA and StA) or "unique" to StA). This study examined the effect of diglossia on reading according to the lexical distance…

Based on sociological, economic, and social-psychological theories of discrimination and bias, this study addresses non-native accents among ethnic minority students as they begin school and explores effects of such accents on their teachers' achievement expectations. Using a unique data set of first graders in Germany, the analysis reveals that a…

This study aimed to examine the validity of the "simple view of reading" (SVR) model in the diglossic Arabic language. Using a longitudinal design, we tested whether decoding and listening comprehension (LC) in kindergarten can later predict reading comprehension (RC) in the first grade and whether the contribution of LC to RC differs…

Background: Arabic is recognised as diglossic; one manifestation of diglossia is the co-existence of two varieties of the language used in different social settings: standard (or literary) Arabic (StA) and spoken Arabic (SpA). The study investigated the impact of lexical-phonological distance in Arabic (identical, cognate, unique, which are…

Recent data have shown that up to 65% of students in Grades 4 and 8 are reading below grade level. The problem addressed in this study was that students with a high dialect density have a more difficult time with mastery of foundational skills in reading, leading to unfortunate reading mastery outcomes as they progress through school. The purpose…

This study aimed to study the association between diglossic reading skills and reading comprehension in first grade students with and without learning disabilities. In this study population, students presented diglossia in literary and colloquial Arabic: 30 first grade students with learning disabilities and 30 first grade students without…

Purpose: This study examined the production of morphosyntactic markers by school-age children with and without developmental language disorder. Comparisons were made between students who speak mainstream American English (MAE) dialects and nonmainstream American English (NMAE) dialects. Method: First- and second-grade students (N = 82) completed…

Science education in the Arab world is conducted in various multilingual contexts. When science is taught in Arabic, diglossia -- the coexistence of the formal language of literacy alongside a local spoken variety -- constitutes a multilingual setting the pedagogical implications of which need to be understood. This study compares teacher--student…

To fully acquire a language, especially its phonology, children need linguistic input from native speakers early on. When interaction with native speakers is not always possible--e.g. for children learning a second language that is not the societal language--audios are commonly used as an affordable substitute. But does such non-interactive input…

Children cannot learn to speak a language simply from occasional noninteractive exposure to native speakers' input (e.g., by hearing television dialogues), but can they learn something about its phonology? To answer this question, the present study varied ambient hearing experience for 126 5- to 7-year-old native Cantonese-Chinese speakers…

Cultural sensitivity and responsiveness are being advocated in reading assessments to reduce the impact of community speech patterns (CSP) on the accuracy of miscue analysis. This study, motivated by a high incidence of retention in 1st grade in a local school district, investigated whether CSP among students affected reading outcomes and…

Purpose: In this study, we examined (a) whether children who spoke Nonmainstream American English (NMAE) frequently in school at the beginning of 1st grade increased their use of Mainstream American English (MAE) through the end of 2nd grade, and whether increasing MAE use was associated with (b) language and reading skills and school context and…

Purpose: This study had 2 principal aims: (a) to examine whether children who spoke Nonmainstream American English (NMAE) frequently in school at the end of kindergarten increased their production of Mainstream American English (MAE) forms by the end of first grade, and (b) to examine concurrent and predictive relations between children's NMAE use…