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 Arabic­speaking 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.