An investigation of performance of typically developing Saudi children on a sentence repetition task

Thirty Arabic speaking Saudi children participated in the study and range in aged between three to five years. The main aim of the study was to investigate the effects of age and gender on the repetition of grammatical morphemes. Results revealed a significant effect of age with an increase in total repetition scores as age in creased. No significant effect of gender was found. Irrespective of age, past tense was found to be more difficult then present tense. Suffix verb agreement was found to be more difficult then prefix verb agreement. Gender adjective agreement was found to be more difficult then adjective article agreement and finally no significant difference was found between overall feminine and masculine gender agreement. A qualitative analysis of errors for each age group revealed a reduction in the percent of omission errors as age increased with an increase in the percent of substitution and addition errors. A qualitative analysis of the degree of difficulty of various grammatical categories was also conducted. The clearest differentiation was in the three year old age group, Articles were the most difficult category followed by prepositions, tense, overall gender agreement and lexical words, respectively. In both the four year old and five year old age groups there is no clear differentiation with regards to order of difficulty. The findings are interpreted in the context of previous studies in investigating Arabic language development and cross-linguistic studies. In the absence of normative data in Arabic sentence repetition provides a potentially useful screening tool for in screening for SLI in Arabic speaking children