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Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXIX: Papers from the Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2015
Edited by Hamid Ouali
[Studies in Arabic Linguistics 5] 2017
► pp. 229–248

Chapter 9
Language growth in child Emirati Arabic

| United Arab Emirates University
| Qatar University
This study calculates developmental indices of language growth in Emirati Arabic based on a two-year longitudinal corpus collected from six Emirati children. The target indices include Mean Length of Utterance in morphemes and words (MLUm and MLUw), utterance-per-turn counts (UoT), type-token-ratio (TTR) and an index of vocabulary diversity (D). Spearman correlation tests show significant correlations between MLUm, MLUw and age. A slightly weaker correlation is found between age and D, while no correlation is found with TTR. Finally, a strong correlation is found between age and UoT. The results provide an important new data point in the body of knowledge about language growth, and show that language acquisition displays similar developmental patterns for linear morphological processes across languages.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Developmental indices
    • Mean length of utterance
    • Lexical growth and turn taking
  • Methodology
    • The EMALAC database
    • Coding and analysis
  • Data and analysis
    • MLU results
    • Lexical diversity
    • Utterance over turn counts
  • Discussion
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sal.5.10nte
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