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Experimental Arabic Linguistics
Edited by Dimitrios Ntelitheos and Tommi Tsz-Cheung Leung
[Studies in Arabic Linguistics 10] 2021
► pp. 177–208

The relationship between word and nonword repetition and receptive and expressive vocabulary skills in Gulf Arabic speaking children

| Mohammed Bin Rashid Center for Special Education- Operated by The New England Center for Children©

This study investigates early phonological skills, as represented by nonword repetition (NWR), in typically developing (TD) Gulf Arabic speaking children and children with language impairment, and tries to examine findings in relation to two important NWR hypotheses: the phonological short term memory account (PSTM, Gathercole & Baddeley, 1990a) and the linguistic account of Snowling, Chiat, and Hulme (1991). We developed a new Arabic word and nonword repetition test (WNRep) and tested 44 TD children and a clinical group (CL) of 15 children with language impairment, between two and four years old. Scores were measured using the percent phonemes correct (PPC) and whole word correct (WWC) methods. The results show that the TD group scored significantly higher than the CL group on the WNRep and across one, two and three-syllable words/nonwords, and that NWR scores correlated significantly with receptive and expressive vocabulary tests. Apart from its ability to differentiate between TD and children with language impairment, NWR results revealed significant differences in groups’ performance even on one-syllable word and nonwords, which differs from findings in other languages. The two different scoring methods did not make any significant contribution to the groups’ results.

Keywords: vocabulary, acquisition, nonword repetition, language impairment
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Relationship between NWR and vocabulary in TD children and children with SLI
    • 1.2Theories of NWR
    • 1.3Factors affecting nonword accuracy
    • 1.4The Arabic word and nonword repetition (WNRep) test
    • 1.5Developing the Arabic expressive vocabulary test (AEVT)
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Procedures and scores
    • 2.3Reliability
  • 3.Results and analysis
    • 3.1Descriptive statistics of WNRep
    • 3.2Groups’ performance on receptive and expressive vocabulary tests
    • 3.3Correlation between word and nonword repetition and receptive and expressive vocabulary in TD children
    • 3.4Regression analysis on the PPC scoring method for TD and CL children
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Summary of findings
    • 4.2Theoretical interpretations and implications
    • 4.3Word and nonword repetition as clinical markers
    • 4.4Relations with receptive and expressive vocabulary
    • 4.5Clinical implications
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 26 July 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sal.10.07kha
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