Plural noun inflection in Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children with and without Specific Language Impairment

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis study examined the production of three types of noun plural inflections, feminine sound plural (FSP), masculine sound plural (MSP), and broken plural (BP) in Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children with and without language impairment. A total of thirty-six Kuwaiti participants – twelve adults, twelve children with specific language impairment (SLI), and twelve typically developing age-matched controls (TD) were presented with twenty-seven pictured stimuli of real and nonsense words. The results showed that the TD children were significantly more accurate in using the required noun plural inflections than the SLI group. The TD children's preferred overgeneralization strategy was to substitute FSP for the regular MSP and irregular BP contexts much more than their peers with SLI. The performance of the SLI group also differed from that of their age-matched counterparts in the number of errors and their distribution across categories. The results are discussed in the light of relevant theories of atypical language development.