Data on the typical and impaired acquisition of Arabic is limited and only a few standardized
Arabic language assessments are available. As a result, the identification of developmental
language disorder (DLD) in Arabic is notoriously challenging. Developing new diagnostic
language tools is thus imperative to facilitate early and accurate identification of DLD in Arabic-speaking children with a view to developing relevant interventions. This thesis addressed this
issue by investigating potential clinical markers of DLD in Arabic through three theoretically
grounded studies focusing on the linguistic and processing deficits that characterize Arabic
speaking children with DLD and could be used as indicators of the presence of the disorder.
Study 1 showed that the production of verb tense and subject-verb agreement is generally
impaired in 5-year-old Arabic-speaking children with DLD relative to same-age peers. Study 1
showed that poor use of present tense and subject-verb feminine agreement could be
potential grammatical markers of DLD in Arabic. Study 2 revealed that nonword repetition is
an area of difficulty for 4 to 6-year-old Arabic-speaking children with DLD. Importantly, Study
2 found that poor nonword repetition accurately identified 93% of children with DLD and 93%
of age-matched TD children, suggesting that poor nonword repetition could also be a possible
clinical marker of DLD in Arabic. Study 3 reported poor sentence repetition abilities in 4 to 6-
year-old Arabic-speaking children; the sentence repetition task correctly identified more than
90% of children with DLD and more than 90% of age-matched TD children. Study 3 thus
suggests that poor sentence repetition may also hold promise as a potential clinical marker for
the presence or absence of DLD in Arabic. The findings of this thesis could help enhance the
diagnostic practices of DLD in Arabic-speaking children by focusing clinicians’ attention on
relevant tasks which could aid diagnosis. The findings extend our understanding of the
underlying mechanisms of DLD. Specifically, the language difficulties of Arabic-speaking
children with DLD seem to reflect a combination of deficits in linguistic knowledge and
processing capacity. This thesis is the first study to my knowledge to address the issue of clinical
markers of DLD in Arabic and as such it paves the way and highlights the need for further
research to better characterize the linguistic and non-linguistic, as well as the functional
limitations in Arabic-speaking children with DLD
