The Role of Morphological and Phonological Awareness in the Early Development of Word Spelling and Reading in Typically Developing and Disabled Arabic Readers

Early Oral Language and Cognitive Predictors of Emergent Literacy Skills in Arabic-Speaking Children: Evidence From Saudi Children With Developmental Language Disorder

PURPOSE

Although children with developmental language disorder (DLD) are known to have difficulties with emergent literacy skills, few available studies have examined emergent literacy skills in Arabic-speaking children with DLD. Even though Arabic language characteristics, such as diglossia and orthographic structure, influence the acquisition of literacy in Arabic-speaking children, research shows that oral language skills, such as vocabulary, and cognitive skills, such as verbal short-term memory (VSTM), predict literacy in Arabic-speaking children. Moreover, linguistic and memory abilities are impaired in children with DLD, including Arabic-speaking children. The current study examines the relationships between oral language, VSTM, and emergent literacy skills in Arabic-speaking typically developing (TD) children and children with DLD.

METHOD

Participants were 40 TD children (20 girls; aged 4;0-6;11 [years;months]) and 26 children with DLD (nine girls, aged 4;0-6;11). All participants were monolingual Arabic speakers and matched on age and socioeconomic status. A set of comprehensive Arabic language (vocabulary knowledge, morphosyntactic, and listening comprehension skills), VSTM, and emergent literacy (phonological awareness and letter knowledge skills) tests were administered.

RESULTS

The DLD group scored significantly lower than the TD group on language, VSTM, and emergent literacy measures. Results revealed that the contributions of oral language and VSTM to emergent literacy skills across TD and DLD groups were different. In the TD group, VSTM predicted emergent literacy skills, whereas in the DLD groups, both vocabulary knowledge and VSTM predicted emergent literacy skills.

CONCLUSIONS

This study represents an important first step in understanding emergent literacy skills and their relationships to language and memory in Arabic-speaking children with and without DLD. The implications of these findings for clinical and education provision are discussed.

The Emergence of Verb Patterns in Arabic in Children With Developmental Language Disorder Compared to Children With Typical Development

PURPOSE

The Arabic verb system features a nonlinear root and pattern derivational morphology. Previous studies suggest that young Arabic and Hebrew speakers' early verb use is based on semantic complexity rather than derivational morphological structure. The present study examines the role of morphological and semantic complexity in the emergence of the verb derivational morphology in Arabic speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD) compared to children with typical language development (TLD).

METHOD

Natural language data were collected from native Arabic-speaking children (40 with DLD; aged 4-6 years and 133 with TLD aged 2;6-6;0 [years;months]) using picture-based elicitation tasks, and verbs were coded morphologically for derivational features and for features of semantic complexity.

RESULTS

The results showed that children with DLD demonstrated a more limited production of verb patterns, both in types and in tokens, than age-matched children with TLD. Also, children with DLD age 5;0-6;0 were similar in types and tokens of verb patterns to younger children with TLD at the age of 3;6-4 years. Moreover, while children with TLD at the age of 2;6-3 years used a smaller number of verb patterns than older 4;0-5;0 aged children with DLD, the two groups were not different in verb semantics. Finally, the morphological and semantic diversity demonstrated by the children with DLD was similar to the morphological and semantic diversity shown by children with TLD.

CONCLUSION

Our findings support the conclusion that children with DLD and with TLD acquire the derivational verb system in the same pathway and the quantitative lexical differences between the two groups support a delay rather than a deviation from the typical developmental trajectory.

The Impact of Verb Inflectional Distance on Morphological Awareness in Arabic Diglossia: Insights From a Longitudinal Study (Kindergarten to Grade 3)

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 Arabic (MSA), on the development of morphological awareness.

METHOD

Sixty-two children were followed longitudinally at three time points: K, Grade 1 (G1), and Grade 3 (G3). Each child completed two parallel orally administered inflectional awareness pseudoverb tasks in the spoken and in the standard variety at each grade. The items were classified by form and function into two main distance levels: low-diglossic and high-diglossic, representing the closest and the farthest distance between SPD and MSA morphemes, respectively.

RESULTS

The findings indicated that morphological awareness was more difficult for high-diglossic morphemes than for low-diglossic ones. Moreover, the findings point to different paths in the developmental trajectory of verb inflectional awareness by distance levels and language variety: In SPD, the difference in children's awareness between low-diglossic morphemes and high-diglossic morphemes decreased across grades and disappeared in G3, whereas, in MSA, this difference significantly increased from K to G1 and G3.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings demonstrate the substantial impact of verb inflectional distance on morphological awareness development before and during the initial process of learning to read. Results are discussed within the context of linguistic distance and the development of metalinguistic processing skills with implications for assessment and intervention.

Children's Command of Four Inflectional Constructions in Arabic: Differences and Development With Age

PURPOSE

This study examines whether differences in acquisition exist among the inflectional constructions of number, gender, possessive pronouns, and tense. Moreover, the study investigates whether these inflectional patterns develop with age.

METHOD

The participants were 1,020 Arabic-speaking kindergartners from K2 and K3. Children were assessed in morphological tasks, which targeted four different morphological inflectional constructions both in real words and pseudowords: gender, number-plural, possessive pronouns, and tense.

RESULTS

Findings reveal the differences between all inflectional constructions. In other words, children demonstrated higher performance in gender construction, followed by construction of numbers and possessive pronouns, while the lowest performance is shown among tense construction. In addition, the results indicate that all inflectional constructions develop with age, that is, there was higher performance in K3 than in K2 in all inflection constructions.

CONCLUSIONS

This study contributes to our knowledge about early language development by showing that the acquisition of gender and number-plurals is faster and more advanced than the acquisition of possessive pronouns or tense. The implications of these results are discussed, especially the need to develop children's inflectional forms such as possessive pronouns and tense, which may eventually also impact narrative understanding and production.

Phonological ability and neural congruency: Phonological loop or more?

OBJECTIVE

We explored neural components in Electroencephalography (EEG) signals during a phonological processing task to assess (a) the neural origins of Baddeley's working-memory components contributing to phonological processing, (b) the unitary structure of phonological processing and (c) the neural differences between children with dyslexia (DYS) and controls (CAC).

METHODS

EEG data were collected from sixty children (half with dyslexia) while performing the initial- and final- phoneme elision task. We explored a novel machine-learning-based approach to identify the neural components in EEG elicited in response to the two conditions and capture differences between DYS and CAC.

RESULTS

Our method identifies two sets of phoneme-related neural congruency components capturing neural activations distinguishing DYS and CAC across conditions.

CONCLUSIONS

Neural congruency components capture the underlying neural mechanisms that drive the relationship between phonological deficits and dyslexia and provide insights into the phonological loop and visual-sketchpad dimensions in Baddeley's model at the neural level. They also confirm the unitary structure of phonological awareness with EEG data.

SIGNIFICANCE

Our findings provide novel insights into the neural origins of the phonological processing differences in children with dyslexia, the unitary structure of phonological awareness, and further verify Baddeley's model as a theoretical framework for phonological processing and dyslexia.

The Role of Morphological Decomposition in Reading Complex Words in Arabic in Elementary School Years

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 high transparency of the root morpheme, while derivations consisted of two morphemes with lower transparency of the root. Results indicated that, despite their matching in frequency and syllabic length, reading performances of derivations was better than those of inflections. That is, three-morphemic highly transparent inflections were read slower and involved more errors than bi-morphemic less transparent derivations. These differences in reading performance between inflectional and derivational words might suggest that Arab-speaking novice readers use a morphological decomposition process that is reflected in reading accuracy and fluency. The results highlight the important role morphology has in reading, even at a young age, along with reading acquisition.

The impact of Diglossia-Effect on Reading Acquisition Among Arabic-Speaking Children: A Longitudinal Study

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 between the SpA and StA forms and whether this influence changes with age. The participants were 137 first-graders that were followed to the second grade. The findings indicated a significant effect of grade level with higher performance in the second grade. A significant association was obtained between the lexical distance and reading accuracy and rate with better performance for identical than unique items across grade levels. No significant interaction between lexical distance and grade level was found. The results indicate the contribution of reading unique and identical forms in the first grade to reading in the second grade. The advantage in reading identical among unique words is discussed in light of the lexical quality hypothesis and dual-route model. The implications of these results were discussed in the context of diglossia, especially the need for StA oral language enrichment at the preschool level.

On the role of morphology in early spelling in Hebrew and Arabic

It is well known that learning to spell is a complex and challenging process, especially for young learners, in part because it relies on multiple aspects of linguistic knowledge, such as phonology and morphology. The present longitudinal study investigated the role of morphology in early spelling in two Semitic languages, Hebrew and Arabic, that are structurally similar but differ in the phonological consistency of phoneme to letter mappings ("backward consistency"). Whereas Arabic mappings are mostly one-to-one - allowing children to rely mainly on phonology to spell words correctly, Hebrew has numerous one-to-many phoneme-to-letter mappings that are governed by morphological considerations, thereby precluding a purely phonological spelling strategy. We, therefore, predicted that morphology would make a more substantial contribution to early Hebrew spelling than to Arabic spelling. We tested this prediction in a longitudinal study of two large parallel samples (Arabic, N = 960; Hebrew, N = 680). We assessed general non-verbal ability, morphological awareness (MA), and phonological awareness (PA) in late Kindergarten and spelling in the middle of the first grade with a spelling-to-dictation task. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that after controlling for age, general intelligence, and phonological awareness, morphological awareness contributed a significant additional 6% variance to Hebrew spelling but only 1% to Arabic word spelling. The results are discussed within the framework of the Functional Opacity Hypothesis (Share, 2008), which we extend to spelling.

What predicts word reading in Arabic?

Efficient and accurate word reading ability is critical for later reading success. As such, it is important to understand the component skills that underlie strong word reading ability. Although a growing research base points to the importance of phonological processing, morphological processing and orthographic processing for accurate and fluent word reading in Arabic, there are few studies that examine all three areas at one time to better understand their role in word reading. Additionally, it remains unclear whether the contribution of the various processes might differ across the early years when children are learning to read. 1,098 pupils in grades 1-3 participated in this study and took tests for phonological processing, morphological processing, orthographic processing, and word reading accuracy and fluency. According to the findings of regression analyses, the relative contribution of these underlying processes differed according to the method used to test word reading and the student's grade level. Regarding accuracy, several subscales of phonological processing and two measures of orthographic processing accounted for significant differences in word reading accuracy for first graders. For second grade students, nonword repetition, elision, and all three measures of orthographic processing accounted for variance. In third grade, elision and memory for digits, word creation and morpheme identification, and letter/sound identification and orthographic fluency were significant predictors of word reading accuracy. In terms of fluency, two subscales of phonological processing, two measures of orthographic processing, and two measures of morphological processing explained significant differences in word reading fluency for first graders. For second grade students, nonword repetition, elision, RAN-digits, isolation, segmenting and all the measures of orthographic processing and word creation explained unique variance in word reading fluency. In third grade, elision, RAN-letters, RAN-digits and phoneme isolation, all measures of orthographic processing and morphological processing, explained variance in word reading fluency. Implications and future directions in research are discussed.

Cognitive and Linguistic Skills Associated With Cross-Linguistic Transfer in the Production of Oral Narratives in English as a Foreign Language by Arabic- and Hebrew-Speaking Children: Finding Common Denominators

Many studies have examined literacy and related skills among learners of English as a foreign language (EFL), but little attention has been given to the role of oral language within a cross-linguistic framework despite the fact that English is the most widely spoken additional language today. Oral narratives rely on lexical, morphosyntactic, and conceptual knowledge. An in-depth examination of this modality can shed light on specific associations between cognitive and linguistic L1 and EFL skills and suggest possible mediating variables that assist multilingual speakers in producing complete oral narratives in EFL. The present study examined L1 and EFL contributors to EFL oral narratives produced by native Arabic (n = 85) and Hebrew (n = 86) speaking sixth graders seeking to identify cross-linguistic influences. We assessed general cognitive skills, phonological memory (PM), lexical, morphosyntactic knowledge, and reading comprehension in L1 (Hebrew speakers), Modern Standard Arabic (MSA, L2), L3 Hebrew (for Arabic speakers) and EFL. The “Cookie Theft” task assessed EFL elicited narratives using modified narrative analysis scales to account for microstructure (lexical and morphosyntactic complexity) and macrostructure (understanding story elements), generating a Total Narrative score. Our results yielded different patterns of underlying psycholinguistic profiles, and cross and within language associations for each group. Strong interactions between L1, L2/L3, and EFL morphological awareness and reading comprehension suggested cross-linguistic transfer. Regression analysis identified the most influential skills supporting EFL narratives for each linguistic group: English reading comprehension (ERC) was essential for Hebrew speakers and English morphological awareness (EMA) for Arabic ones. These results suggested different allocations of cognitive and linguistic resources in EFL narratives. The results also allowed to identify a common mediating skill for both groups. Findings are discussed within the theoretical framework of the Interdependence Hypothesis, the Linguistic Proximity Model, as well as accounts of direct and indirect transfer, which illuminate the impact of typological distance, general language proficiency and components of linguistic knowledge on cross-linguistic transfer in EFL oral language production.

Distribution of Nominal Word-Patterns and Roots in Palestinian Arabic: A Developmental Perspective in Early Childhood

This study investigated the acquisition of word-patterns and roots in the nominal system of the spoken language of Palestinian Arabic (PA) and its distance from Standard Arabic (StA). It described, analyzed, and quantified the nominal system (roots and word-patterns) as reflected in the language corpus of Palestinian-Arab kindergarteners 3 to 6 years old. The results showed that non-linear derived nouns (deverbal nouns) are the most frequently used category (49.5%). Primitive nouns comprise 43.1% of the nouns, whereas linear derived nouns barely exist before children start school (0.3%). Additionally, the results showed that half of the nouns were built from common word-patterns and roots between PA and StA, whereas 30% of the nouns were constructed from different word-patterns with common roots. Although PA and StA have much in common morphologically, there exists a significant degree of divergence.

The reciprocal relation between morphological awareness and spelling in Chinese: A longitudinal study of primary school students

Spelling is a literacy skill that must be mastered during children's academic development. It involves a variety of cognitive factors, including morphological awareness. Studies in the alphabet and Chinese systems have shown that there is a close relationship between morphological awareness and spelling. Although there is clearly a significant unidirectional effect of morphological awareness on spelling significantly, few studies have explored the bidirectional relationship between morphological awareness and spelling. This three-time point longitudinal study was designed to investigate the reciprocal effects of morphological awareness and character spelling in Chinese. Participants included 124 children from two primary schools in Mainland China. The students were tracked from first grade to third grade and were administered a battery of tests to measure morphological awareness (e.g., homophone awareness, homograph awareness, and compounding awareness) and spelling to dictation, controlling for IQ, phonological awareness, and orthographic awareness. A structural equation model was utilized to examine the reciprocal relation between the students' morphological awareness and character spelling. Results showed that earlier morphological awareness predicted subsequent spelling abilities from first grade to third grade and spelling in first grade predicted morphological awareness in second grade; however, spelling in second grade did not predict the subsequent morphological awareness in third grade. This study suggests that there is a bidirectional association between morphological awareness and spelling from first grade to second grade in Chinese, and a unidirectional association between morphological awareness and spelling from second grade to third grade. Future studies could examine the causal relationship between morphological awareness and character spelling by using an instructional intervention.

A general role for ventral white matter pathways in morphological processing: Going beyond reading

The ability to recognize the structural components of words, known as morphological processing, was recently associated with the bilateral ventral white matter pathways, across different writing systems. However, it remains unclear whether these associations are specific to the context of reading. To shed light on this question, in the current study we investigated whether the ventral pathways are associated with morphological processing in an oral word production task that does not involve reading. Forty-five participants completed a morpheme-based fluency task in Hebrew, as well as diffusion MRI (dMRI) scans. We used probabilistic tractography to segment the major ventral and dorsal white matter pathways, and assessed the correlations between their microstructural properties and performance on the morpheme-based fluency task. We found significant correlations between morpheme-based fluency and properties of the bilateral ventral tracts, suggesting that the involvement of these tracts in morphological processing extends beyond the reading modality. In addition, significant correlations were found in the frontal aslant tract (FAT), a dorsal tract associated with oral fluency and speech production. Together, our findings emphasize that neurocognitive associations reflect both the cognitive construct under investigation as well as the task used for its assessment. Lastly, to elucidate the biological factors underlying these correlations, we incorporated the composite hindered and restricted model of diffusion (CHARMED) framework, measured in independent scans. We found that only some of our findings could be attributed to variation in a CHARMED-based estimate of fiber density. Further, we were able to uncover additional correlations that could not be detected using traditional dMRI indices. In sum, our results show that the involvement of the ventral tracts in morphological processing extends to the production domain, and demonstrate the added value of including sensitive structural measurements in neurocognitive investigations.

Early Sensitivity to Morphology in Beginning Readers of Arabic

The current study investigated the influence of morphological structure on the earliest stages of Arabic reading acquisition. More specifically, we aimed at examining the role of root and pattern units in beginners from Grade 1 to 3. A first set of reading tasks evaluated the presence of a morphology facilitation effect in word and pseudoword reading by manipulating independently the frequency of roots and patterns. Additional tasks aimed at examining the contribution of morphological awareness to reading performance. The results suggest that reading ability is early influenced by the awareness of morphological composition. Children read faster and more accurately pseudowords composed of frequent morphemes. Furthermore, regression analyses revealed, for every reading measure, a significant contribution of one morphological test in addition to grapheme knowledge. Results are discussed taking into account the differences obtained depending on lexicality and morpheme type (root or pattern).

Learning to Spell in Arabic: The Impact of Script-Specific Visual-Orthographic Features

Learning to spell is a challenging process, especially for young learners, in part because it relies on multiple aspects of linguistic knowledge, primarily phonological and morphological. However, alongside these universals, there are significant writing system specifics, namely, language-specific and script-specific factors that may also challenge young readers and writers (Daniels and Share, 2018). The current study focuses on the impact of four distinctive visual-orthographic features of the Arabic abjad on spelling, namely, (i) the similarity of many basic letter-forms, (ii) allography (the positional variants of the letter forms), (iii) ligaturing (the joining of letters), and (iv) non-linearity (extra-linear diacritic-like signs used to mark consonantal, short vowel and morpho-syntactic distinctions). We examined the distribution of visual-orthographic spelling errors across three grade levels as well as the developmental changes in these errors. We predicted that these errors would account for a significant proportion of children's spelling errors. Ninety-six Arabic-speaking pupils from three elementary grades (1st, 2nd, 4th grades) were presented with a sequence of six pictures and asked to write a story or several sentences about the events depicted. All spelling errors were analyzed and categorized according to two types of categories: six visual-orthographic categories and six additional categories that relate to the more traditional error types (e.g., phonological). The results showed that the visual-orthographic category was the second most common error category across the three grade levels, accounting for over one quarter of all spelling errors. Ligaturing and letter shape formation errors emerged as the two most prevalent types of errors in this category. These findings clearly demonstrate that visual-orthographic features of the Arabic abjad pose significant challenges in learning to spell.

Effects of rapid automatized naming and phonological awareness deficits on the reading ability of Arabic-speaking elementary students

Dyslexia is one of the most common reading disabilities everywhere, including the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Studies have shown that rapid automatized naming (RAN) and phonological awareness (PA) are factors associated with dyslexia. Arabic is a language with unique orthographic features making it different from English and other European languages. There are limited studies of the effects of RAN and PA on reading achievement in Arabic. This article reports an investigation into the effects of RAN and PA on the reading ability of Arabic-speaking children with no reported history of intellectual, speech, language, or hearing disabilities. A cohort of 615 third-grade students at five public schools in the UAE were tested on the Arabic Reading Ability Scale (ARAS) and those with the lowest 20% of scores were then subjected to a PA test and a RAN test. Those with no RAN or PA deficit were found to achieve the highest mean Arabic reading score, followed in descending order by the RAN deficit, PA deficit and double-deficit groups. Taken together, the results confirm that phonological skills and naming-speed skills make distinct contributions to reading ability and that deficits in these two areas are particularly pronounced among individuals with dyslexia.

Phonological processing in students with developmental dyslexia, ADHD and intellectual disability

ABSTRACT Purpose: to compare the performance of students with dyslexia, intellectual disability and ADHD on the skills of phonological awareness, phonological access to the mental lexicon, and phonological working memory. Methods: this is a descriptive, cross sectional and quantitative study. The sample was composed of 32 students, divided into the following groups: G1 - students with dyslexia; G2 - students with ADHD; G3 - students with intellectual disability. The children were assessed on their skills of phonological awareness, phonological working memory, and phonological access to the mental lexicon. A descriptive and inferential analysis was made, using the non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis test. Results: statistically significant differences were observed among the three groups on the phonological working memory skills for pseudowords, forward digit repetition, and backward digit repetition; phonological awareness on syllable level, phoneme level, test total score, and digits subtest of the rapid automatized naming test. Through the descriptive analysis, it was observed that G1 had the best results on all the skills assessed, followed by G2 and G3 Conclusion: differences were found on the skills of phonological working memory and phonological awareness among the groups of students presented with dyslexia, ADHD and intellectual disability.

Does phonological distance impact quality of phonological representations? Evidence from Arabic diglossia

The study tested the impact of the phonological distance between Spoken Arabic (SpA) and Standard Arabic (StA) on quality of phonological representations among kindergarten, first-, second-, and sixth-grade Arabic-speaking children (N = 120). A pronunciation accuracy judgment task targeted three types of StA words that varied in extent of phonological distance from their form in SpA: (a) identical words, with an identical lexical-phonological form in StA and SpA; (b) cognate words, with partially overlapping phonological forms; items in this category varied in degree of phonological distance too; and (c) unique words with entirely different lexical-phonological forms. Multilevel Regression analysis showed that phonological distance had a significant impact on quality of phonological representations across all grades. Growth in quality of phonological representations was mainly noted between the three younger groups and the sixth-graders. Implications for the impact of phonological distance on phonological representations and on language and literacy development are discussed.

Development and Relationships Between Phonological Awareness, Morphological Awareness and Word Reading in Spoken and Standard Arabic

This study addressed the development of and the relationship between foundational metalinguistic skills and word reading skills in Arabic. It compared Arabic-speaking children's phonological awareness (PA), morphological awareness, and voweled and unvoweled word reading skills in spoken and standard language varieties separately in children across five grade levels from childhood to adolescence. Second, it investigated whether skills developed in the spoken variety of Arabic predict reading in the standard variety. Results indicate that although individual differences between students in PA are eliminated toward the end of elementary school in both spoken and standard language varieties, gaps in morphological awareness and in reading skills persisted through junior and high school years. The results also show that the gap in reading accuracy and fluency between Spoken Arabic (SpA) and Standard Arabic (StA) was evident in both voweled and unvoweled words. Finally, regression analyses showed that morphological awareness in SpA contributed to reading fluency in StA, i.e., children's early morphological awareness in SpA explained variance in children's gains in reading fluency in StA. These findings have important theoretical and practical contributions for Arabic reading theory in general and they extend the previous work regarding the cross-linguistic relevance of foundational metalinguistic skills in the first acquired language to reading in a second language, as in societal bilingualism contexts, or a second language variety, as in diglossic contexts.

Impact of Diglossia on Word and Non-word Repetition among Language Impaired and Typically Developing Arabic Native Speaking Children

The study tested the impact of the phonological and lexical distance between a dialect of Palestinian Arabic spoken in the north of Israel (SpA) and Modern Standard Arabic (StA or MSA) on word and non-word repetition in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and in typically developing (TD) age-matched controls. Fifty kindergarten children (25 SLI, 25 TD; mean age 5;5) and fifty first grade children (25 SLI, 25 TD; mean age 6:11) were tested with a repetition task for 1-4 syllable long real words and pseudo words; Items varied systematically in whether each encoded a novel StA phoneme or not, namely a phoneme that is only used in StA but not in the spoken dialect targeted. Real words also varied in whether they were lexically novel, meaning whether the word is used only in StA, but not in SpA. SLI children were found to significantly underperform TD children on all repetition tasks indicating a general phonological memory deficit. More interesting for the current investigation is the observed strong and consistent effect of phonological novelty on word and non-word repetition in SLI and TD children, with a stronger effect observed in SLI. In contrast with phonological novelty, the effect of lexical novelty on word repetition was limited and it did not interact with group. The results are argued to reflect the role of linguistic distance in phonological memory for novel linguistic units in Arabic SLI and, hence, to support a specific Linguistic Distance Hypothesis of SLI in a diglossic setting. The implications of the findings for assessment, diagnosis and intervention with Arabic speaking children with SLI are discussed.