Journal of Child Language (2018), 45, 1377–1399
doi:10.1017/S0305000918000302
ARTICLE
Does phonological distance impact quality of
phonological representations? Evidence from
Arabic diglossia
Elinor SAIEGH-HADDAD1* and Lina HAJ1,2
1
Bar-Ilan University, Israel and 2Western Galilee Hospital, Israel
*Corresponding author. Department of English Literature and Linguistics, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan
52900, Israel. E-mail: Elinor.Saiegh-Haddad@biu.ac.il
(Received 27 November 2017; revised 6 May 2018; accepted 3 July 2018;
first published online 13 August 2018)
Abstract
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.
Keywords: Arabic; diglossia; literacy; phonological distance; phonological representations
Introduction
Phonological representations play a fundamental role in word reading development
(Perfetti, 2007; Perfetti & Hart, 2001; Perfetti & Stafura, 2014), and in the
development of other critical academic skills, such as phonological processing,
word retrieval, word learning, word decoding, and reading comprehension (e.g.,
Gathercole & Baddeley, 1990; Gray, 2005; Nouwens, Groen, Kleemans, & Verhoeven,
2018; Perfetti, Wlotko, & Hart, 2005; Verhoeven, Leeuwe, Irausquin, & Segers, 2016).
This warrants an in-depth understanding of the linguistic factors that impact the
establishment and development of phonological representations. Also warranted is an
investigation of the role of sociolinguistic factors that pertain to language exposure
and use on phonological representations, especially in bilectal and bilingual contexts
(Gibson, Summers, Pena, Dedore, Gillam, & Bohman, 2015; Saiegh-Haddad &
© Cambridge University Press 2018
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Saiegh-Haddad and Haj
Ghawi-Dakwar, 2017; Themistocleous, 2017). The current study investigates
phonological representations in Arabic diglossia. In this context, children
simultaneously develop two linguistic systems: Spoken Arabic (SpA) for everyday
informal speech and Standard Arabic (StA) for formal speech and reading/writing.
Importantly, the StA phonological form of the word may vary in extent of distance
from (alternatively proximity or overlap with) its form in SpA, and this distance can
range from almost identical to entirely different forms. The study tests the impact of
the phonological distance between the SpA and StA forms on quality of phonological
representations in children at different developmental stages from kindergarten to
sixth grade. By studying the impact of the phonological distance between StA and
SpA on the establishment and development of phonological representations in StA,
this investigation will shed light on the factors that impact phonological
representations in diglossic Arabic, in particular, and in analogous bilectal and
bilingual contexts.
Phonological representations
Lexical Quality (Perfetti, 2007; Perfetti & Hart, 2001) refers to the quality of stored
phonological, orthographic, and semantic representations of lexical items, as well as
the retrieval efficiency of these representations. High-quality lexical representations
are thought to develop over time and to allow for efficient retrieval of words.
Phonological representations, which capture the range of phonological information
about words that language users store in long-term memory (Elbro & Jensen, 2005),
are a fundamental component of the lexical representations of words and are
essential to language and literacy development (e.g., Elbro, Borstrøm, & Petersen,
1998; Nouwens et al., 2018; Verhoeven et al., 2016).
Research on phonological representations concerned the underlying nature of this
construct and the linguistic underpinnings that underlie its establishment and
development. In this respect, it has been demonstrated that phonological
representations are multilayered and allow speakers to represent and process
phonological information at different levels (e.g., the syllable, the onset-rime, the
phoneme). At the same time, phonological representations are dynamic and
developmental and they undergo enormous change during the first few years of a
child’s speech and language development (Fowler, 1991). The LEXICAL RESTRUCTURING
MODEL (Metsala & Walley, 1998) captures the factors that influence the development
of phonological representations. According to this model, because the vocabulary
store of young children is small, there is no need to represent words in a detailed
manner, and therefore early word representations may be holistic. As vocabulary
grows, however, these holistic representations are gradually restructured, so that
smaller units of sound such as syllables, onset-rimes, and, ultimately, phonemes are
encoded (Metsala, 1997; Metsala & Walley, 1998; Walley, 1993).
Phonological representations are also word-specific, and as a result sensitive to the
phonological properties of the word, such as the size of the phonological family (or
phonological neighborhood density); As such, the increasing number of similarly
sounding words in the child’s mental lexicon creates developmental pressure to
develop representations that encode smaller units of sound for words in dense
phonological neighborhoods (De Cara & Goswami, 2003). Research shows that
functional properties of words, such as familiarity status, indexed by word frequency
and age of acquisition, also impact phonological representational quality (Metsala,
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Journal of Child Language
1379
1997; Storkel, Armbrüster, & Hogan, 2006). Finally, phonological representations are
affected by letter knowledge and by exposure to literacy. As such, understanding that
a particular letter corresponds to a particular phoneme might precipitate the
restructuring of the lexicon (Carroll & Snowling, 2001; Dollaghan & Campbell, 1998;
Gray & Brinkley, 2011; Walley, 1993), especially when the orthography is transparent
(de Gelder & Vroomen, 1991; Goswami, Schneider, & Scheurich, 1999).
Phonological representations capture abstract knowledge of phonological
probabilities and phonological properties of words, and this may be tested using
pseudo-word stimuli too. In fact, a commonly used task of phonological memory,
and one that is argued to be strongly affected by phonological representations, is a
task that requires the repetition of nonwords (Gathercole, 1995). Nonword repetition
was found to be affected by language-specific lexical factors, or WORDLIKENESS,
operationalized as the extent to which a nonword is similar to a real word in lexical
parameters: phonotactic probability, syllabic length, morphological structure, and
stress patterns (Gathercole, 1995; Gathercole & Baddeley, 1990). These findings
endorse the role of phonological representations in verbal memory tasks and are in
keeping with Baddeley’s (2003) multi-componential model of working memory
which posits a positive influence of phonological representational quality in longterm memory on phonological processing in working memory.
Because phonological representations are extracted from the lexicon, they show a
significant correlation with vocabulary size, both in L1 (e.g., Conti-Ramsden, 2003 ;
Hoff, Core, & Bridges, 2008 ; Rispens & Baker, 2012) and in L2 (Dufva & Voeten,
1999; Masoura & Gathercole, 1999; Schwartz, Yeh, & Shaw, 2008). Relatedly, children
who struggle with vocabulary acquisition, such as children with developmental
language disorders (DLD), show a strong nonword repetition deficit (Gathercole,
1995) and are more strongly affected by WORDLIKENESS than typically developing
children, even when degree of language exposure is similar (Armon-Lotem, 2017).
This suggests a deficit in phonological representations in these children. Children
with developmental reading disorder also show a phonological representations
deficit (Hansen & Bowey, 1994; Katz, 1986; Snowling, Stackhouse, & Rack 1986;
Stackhouse & Wells, 1997). It has been argued by several researchers that lack of
distinctness and/or segmental specificity in the representations supporting spoken
word recognition and production might underlie the phonological processing and
reading difficulties observed in individuals with reading disability (Adlard & Hazan,
1998; Elbro, 1998; Goswami, 2000; Snowling, 2000). Evidence in support of this
argument is offered by Elbro et al. (1998), who show that a measure of the
distinctness of phonological representations taken in kindergarten is a particularly
sensitive predictor of poor phoneme awareness two years later in children of dyslexic
parents. In the same way, Swan and Goswami (1997a) demonstrate a picture naming
deficit in developmental dyslexia, implying difficulty in the underlying phonological
representations of words. Moreover, they show that when phonological
representational quality is taken into account some of the phonological awareness
deficits observed in dyslexic children disappear (Swan & Goswami, 1997b).
Despite significant progress in our understanding of the nature of phonological
representations and their relationship with language and reading development,
research in this domain remains lacking in two ways. First, it focuses mainly on
impaired populations. Second, it addresses structural linguistic factors to the
exclusion of sociolinguistic factors. In effect, two issues remain unaddressed. The first
is the nature and development of phonological representations among typically
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Saiegh-Haddad and Haj
developing children. The second is the role of sociolinguistic factors that pertain to
language exposure and use on phonological representations. Arabic diglossia, in
which children simultaneously acquire and use two linguistic systems that vary in
their phonological structure – SpA for everyday speech and StA for formal speech
and writing – provides a natural setting for testing these questions. The current study
explores phonological representations in Arabic diglossia; it tests the impact of the
phonological distance between the two language varieties, and of related differences
in extent of exposure and use, on phonological representational quality for StA
words. This question has important theoretical implications. Furthermore, because
young Arabic-speaking children first learn to read in StA, and before they have fully
acquired the phonological system of this language variety, the impact of the
phonological distance between SpA and StA on phonological representations may
turn out to be fundamental for understanding some of the underpinnings of
language and reading development and difficulties in Arabic (Saiegh-Haddad, 2017a;
Saiegh-Haddad & Everatt, 2017).
Diglossia and phonological processing in Arabic
All Arabic native-speaking children are born into a dual linguistic context called
‘diglossia’ (Ferguson, 1959). In diglossic Arabic, children grow up speaking a local
dialect of SpA that they hear at home and in the neighborhood. Yet, at school,
around the age of six, they are formally and extensively exposed to (Modern)
Standard Arabic as the language of reading and writing, while Spoken Arabic
remains the language of informal speech, even inside the classroom (Amara, 1995).
Outside the school context, there is a stable co-existence of the two major varieties,
each functioning for distinct spheres of social communication: SpA is used by all
native speakers – young and old, educated and uneducated – for informal and
intimate verbal interaction in the home, at work, and in the community. StA is at
least expected to be used for formal oral interactions, such as delivering a speech or
a lecture, and is the only variety considered appropriate for writing (however, see
Al-Khatib & Sabbah, 2008, Haggan, 2007, and Mostari, 2009, on use of SpA in
electronic writing in Arabic). Notwithstanding the fact that extensive exposure to StA
begins with the inception of formal schooling and reading instruction in the first
grade, Arabic-speaking children are simultaneously exposed to StA: they pray in StA,
watch TV programs and dubbed series in StA, read stories (or are read to) in StA,
and do all their written school work in StA. Thus, linguistic proficiency in Arabic
requires proficiency in both SpA and StA.
StA is a largely uniform code (Holes, 2004). In contrast, spoken Arabic vernaculars
are mainly regional varieties and they vary from one country to another and from one
city, town, or village to another. Despite the vast linguistic differences between the
different vernaculars of SpA (which might lead to linguistic unintelligibility, as
between Western and Eastern dialects of Arabic), they are all structurally related to
StA (Maamouri, 1998). At the same time, a contrastive linguistic comparison of StA
with any specific dialect of SpA always reveals differences in all domains of language,
including the phonological, morphological, morphosyntactic, and lexical–semantic
domains (Saiegh-Haddad & Henkin-Roitfarb, 2014).
Given the linguistic distance between SpA and StA, any given linguistic unit in
Arabic may have any one of three linguistic affiliations: only-StA, only-SpA, or
StA-and-SpA. This trichotomy may be applied to all domains of language. In the
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Journal of Child Language
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domain of phonology, for instance, Arabic phonemes may belong (for speakers of a
given vernacular) to one of the following categories: (a) only-SpA phonemes, which
are used in a specific SpA vernacular but are not within the phonemic inventory of
StA (e.g., the voiceless affricate /č/ used in some rural dialects of Palestinian Arabic
used in Israel); (b) only-StA phonemes, which are only standard and not within a
given spoken vernacular (e.g., interdental fricatives: voiced /ð/ and voiceless /Ɵ/ in
most urban dialects of Palestinian Arabic spoken in the north of Israel); and (c)
StA-and-SpA phonemes, which are phonemes used in both SpA and StA. In the
domain of phonology, this last category comprises by far the largest set of Arabic
phonemes.
Applying the same three-way classification delineated above to the lexical domain, a
recent study analyzed a corpus of 4,408 word types derived from a total of 17,499 word
tokens collected from five-year-old speakers of Palestinian Arabic in Central Israel
(Saiegh-Haddad & Spolsky, 2014). This analysis revealed the following distribution of
lexical items: (a) IDENTICAL WORDS, words that have an identical phonological form in
SpA and StA (e.g., /na:m/ ‘sleep’, /janu:b/ ‘south’, or /daftar/ ‘notebook’), made up
21.2% of the word types in the children’s lexicon – note that StA case and mood
inflections were not regarded in this analysis; (b) COGNATE WORDS, words that are
phonologically related yet show only partially overlapping phonological forms when
used in each of the two varieties (e.g., SpA /dahab /versus StA /ðahab/ ‘gold’; SpA
/sama/ versus StA /sama:Ɂ/ ‘sky’), made up another 40.6%; and (c) UNIQUE SPA
WORDS, words that have a unique form in SpA that is completely different from the
one used in StA (e.g., SpA /juzda:n/ versus StA /ħaqi:bah/ ‘bag’; SpA /ħat / versus
StA /wad aʕ/ ‘he put’), made up 38.2% of the total number of word types in the
children’s lexicon. This study also showed that the majority of cognate words (∼42%)
depicted one phonological distance parameter between their form in SpA and StA,
such as consonant substitution, glottal stop deletion, vowel change, and vowel
insertion. This was followed by cognates depicting two phonological distance
parameters (∼24%) and three phonological distance parameters (∼11%), with all
other word types depicting more than three phonological distance parameters each
making up less than 5% of the total number of cognates.
The results reported above have serious implications for StA language and literacy
acquisition in Arabic. This is because they show that only about 20% of the word
types in the SpA lexicon of a five-year-old child, who will soon embark on the
reading acquisition journey, have identical phonological forms in StA, the language
of literacy, whereas almost 80% of the total number of word types in their lexicon
have different forms (either completely different – unique word – or partially
different – cognate words). Given established evidence for the important role of oral
language skills, and of lexical quality in language and reading development, such a
massive orality–literacy gap is expected to have a strong impact on children’s ability
to develop language and literacy skills in StA (Perfetti & Stafura, 2014; Verhoeven
et al., 2016).
The study of the impact of the linguistic distance between SpA and StA on language
and literacy development in diglossic Arabic is scarce. With a focus on reading, and on
phonological skills in particular, Saiegh-Haddad and colleagues (Saiegh-Haddad, 2003,
2004, 2005, 2007a; Saiegh-Haddad, Levin, Hende, & Ziv, 2011; Saiegh-Haddad & Schiff,
2016; Schiff & Saiegh-Haddad, 2017, 2018) tested the impact of the phonological
distance between SpA and StA on the acquisition of literacy-related skills in StA,
including phonological awareness, pseudo-word decoding, and word reading accuracy
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Saiegh-Haddad and Haj
and fluency. These studies showed that the acquisition of reading, and of related
phonological processing skills, is impacted by the phonological distance between SpA
and StA, both in impaired and in typically developing readers. Research has also
endorsed the debilitative impact of phonological distance on letter naming (Asaad &
Eviatar, 2013) and on phonological memory in typically developing and in children
with developmental language disorder (Saiegh-Haddad & Ghawi-Dakwar, 2017).
Altogether, the results from these studies suggest difficulty among Arabic-speaking
children in developing high-quality phonological representations for StA words.
To sum up, research shows that phonological representations are gradient, and that
their construction and acquisition are affected by structural linguistic factors (e.g.,
neighborhood density) as well as by functional factors (e.g., frequency). Moreover,
phonological representations affect the acquisition of language and literacy skills.
These findings are fundamental when conceived within the framework of
COMPARATIVE LINGUALITY, which situates multilectalism and its impact on language and
literacy development on a gradient scale (Grohmann & Kambanaros, 2016; Rowe &
Grohmann, 2013). The current study tests the role of phonological distance between
the two forms of a word: a dialectal spoken form and a standardized mainly written
form, on the development of phonological representations in a bilectal context. The
study addresses this question in diglossic Arabic. It tests the impact of the
phonological distance between SpA and StA on phonological representations for StA
words by asking children in senior kindergarten (one year before first grade), and
first-, second-, and sixth-grade children to make pronunciation accuracy judgments
on StA words that vary in phonological distance from their forms in SpA. By
manipulating the phonological distance/overlap between the form of the word in StA
and in SpA, the study allows an exploration of whether the construction of
phonological representations for StA words in Arabic is affected by the phonological
distance between StA and SpA. Moreover, by testing children at different grade
levels, and particularly at the point of transition from kindergarten to the first grade
and into the second grade, it is possible to test the developmental trajectory of
phonological representations and the extent to which they benefit from extensive
exposure to StA and from learning to read in StA. In this context, sixth-graders are
included as a comparison group.
It was hypothesized that the larger the distance between the SpA and the StA forms
the more difficult it would be for children to make a correct pronunciation accuracy
judgment; hence, identical words were expected to yield the highest accuracy rates,
followed by cognate words and then by unique words. It was also hypothesized that
cognate words would yield variations in representational accuracy that would be
commensurate with the degree of phonological distance. Finally, it was predicted that
the older the participant the more accurate phonological representations would
become, with sixth-grade children faring the highest among all four groups and
probably showing ceiling levels of performance.
Method
Participants
The sample for the study consisted of 120 children enrolled in a Christian private school
in northern Israel. All children were native speakers of an urban dialect of Palestinian
Arabic spoken in the north of Israel and were from a middle socioeconomic
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Journal of Child Language
1383
background. No child had reported hearing, language, psychological, behavioral, or
neurological problems. Four age-groups were targeted: Senior Kindergarten (N = 30;
Mean age = 5.9 years; 15 females); First grade (N = 30; Mean age = 7.2 years; 17
females); Second grade (N = 30; Mean age = 7.7 years; 14 females); and Sixth grade
(N = 30; Mean age = 11.4 years, 15 females).
Materials
Item words for the study were selected from a Spoken Arabic corpus collected from
five-year-old native speakers of Palestinian Arabic in northern and central Israel as
well as from elementary school textbooks (Saiegh-Haddad, 2007b; Saiegh-Haddad &
Spolsky, 2014). The following criteria were followed in the selection of words. All
items were concrete nouns that could be easily represented in a picture, and they
were between 1 and 3 syllables long. All words were within the receptive vocabulary
of all children. In order to verify this, a picture-naming vocabulary pre-test was
conducted. In this pre-test, each of the candidate StA words was embedded within a
simple sentence in StA and was orally presented to the children along with four
pictures (correct picture plus 3 distractors). Participants were instructed to point to
the picture that best represented the target sentence. For instance, the word /țabah/
‘ball’ was inserted within the sentence ‘the girl is playing with a ball’ and was
presented together with four pictures, a girl playing with a ball and three other
distractors: a girl dancing, a girl playing with blocks, and a girl playing with toys.
Recognizing the correct sentence required that children recognize the target word
‘ball’ which distinguished the target picture from the three distractors. Only those
words that were recognized by all children were included in the experiment.
A total of 108 words were selected that belonged to one of the three following word
categories: (1) IDENTICAL WORDS (N items = 18, e.g., SpA-StA /bațți:x/ ‘watermelon’; (2)
UNIQUE STA WORDS (N items = 18, e.g., StA /miծallah/ ‘umbrella’; and (3) COGNATE
WORDS (N items = 72). Cognate words were classified into four subclasses that varied
in degree of phonological distance/overlap between their SpA and StA forms
(N items = 18 per category): (a) 1-phoneme distant cognates; within this category,
words were further divided into two types: 1-vowel distant cognates (e.g., StA /fuțu:r/;
SpA /fțu:r/ ‘breakfast’; vowel deletion) and 1-consonant distant cognates (e.g., StA
/qalam/; SpA /Ɂalam/ ‘pen’; consonant substitution); (b) 2-phoneme distant cognates:
a vowel and a consonant (e.g., StA /miqlama/, SpA /miɁlami/ ‘pencil bag’; (d) more
than 2-phoneme distant cognates (e.g., StA /ța:Ɂira/; SpA /țayya:ra/ ‘airplane’).
Modelled after similar methodological procedures (Brenders, Hell, & Dijkstra, 2011;
Cristoffaninia, Kirsnera, & Milecha, 1986), half of the stimuli were used in their
intact form (N items = 54) while the second half were subjected to a phoneme
substitution procedure yielding a pseudo-word (N items = 54). Four criteria were
considered in selecting the location of the phonological substitution procedure and
the phonological profile of the two phonemes to be exchanged: (a) the target
phoneme to be replaced was not a phonological distance parameter in the word, and
therefore replacing it by another phoneme did not alter the phonological distance of
the StA word from its SpA form. For instance, if the StA word varied from its SpA
form in one consonant (e.g., StA /muծi:ʕ/; SpA /muzi:ʕ/ ‘newscaster’), consonant
substitution could not apply to the variable consonant /ծ/ but to another consonant
within the word; (b) the target phoneme to be replaced was a consonant, not a
vowel; (c) the target phoneme to be replaced was a medial consonant; not the initial
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Saiegh-Haddad and Haj
nor the final; and (d) the phoneme which would replace the target original phoneme
was also a consonant and was different from the original phoneme in only one
feature of articulation: voicing, place of articulation, or manner of articulation. It is
important to point out that the nouns selected for the study were not deverbal
nouns (not derived by a root), so affiliation of the consonant with the root
morpheme of the word was not relevant for the phoneme substitution procedure. It
is also important to add that, whereas words in the first two categories of cognates
(1- and 2-phoneme distant cognates) involved paradigmatic phonological differences
between SpA and StA (e.g., vowel insertion, vowel change, consonant substitution,
word-final glottal stop deletion, word-initial glottal stop deletion, etc.), words in the
third category (more than 2-phoneme distant cognates) involved mainly words that
depicted word-specific phonological differences. Because all words targeted in the
study were within the receptive vocabulary of children, and because the phoneme
substitution procedure did not alter the phonological distance of the StA word from
its SpA form, these words too were deemed appropriate for inclusion in this study.
All pseudo-words that resulted from the phoneme substitution procedure were
pronounceable strings of sound that abided by the phonotactics of StA. See
‘Appendix’ for examples of items.
Procedure
The experiment used a computerized, picture-supported pronunciation accuracy
judgment task (Anthony, Williams, Aghara, Dunkelberger, Novak, & Mukherjee,
2010). The task was designed using the Opensesame software (Mathôt, Schreij, &
Theeuwes, 2012). Each of the target StA words was presented on a computer screen
together with a picture illustrating the object noun it represented, and a sound file of
its correct pronunciation if it was a real word and its twisted form if it was a
pseudo-word. Participants were asked to decide if the pronunciation of the target
StA word was correct or not. If correct, s/he was asked to press a green bar. If
incorrect, s/he was asked to press a red bar. A picture of a broadcaster holding a
microphone always appeared on the left-hand top corner of the screen to remind
participants that the experiment involved StA words. The participant was told that
this broadcaster (pointing to the picture on the left-hand top corner of the computer
screen) did not speak StA properly, and therefore her/his task was to judge if the
pronunciation of the word represented in the picture was accurate or not.
Data was collected by the second author, a graduate student of speech and language
pathology and a native speaker of the dialect targeted in this study. Authorization for
data collection was obtained from the office of the chief scientist of the Ministry of
Education. Written parental consent was obtained from all children participating in
the study. The child received one score if s/he pressed the correct bar – green for
correct and red for incorrect – and a zero score if s/he pressed the wrong bar. ALPHA
CRONBACH reliability across all tested words was α = .80.
Results
The study tested the effect of the phonological distance between SpA and StA on
phonological representations by targeting three types of StA words – identical,
cognate, and unique – in four grade levels: kindergarten, first, second, and sixth
grade. Furthermore, we tested phonological representations for different types of
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Journal of Child Language
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cognate words that varied in degree of phonological distance between their forms in StA
and SpA. Table 1 presents summary statistics of pronunciation accuracy judgments by
phonological distance and grade.
In order to assess the word’s phonological distance effect and the individual child’s
effect on each pronunciation accuracy judgment, we used a mixed-effects model within
a cross-classification approach with subjects and items as crossed random effects
(Baayen, Davidson, & Bates, 2008). This multilevel analysis assumes that children
differ from each other over all pronunciation accuracy judgments they perform, and
that words differ from each other across the children who performed the judgment
tasks across all words. The smallest unit of measurement in this analysis is a single
pronunciation accuracy judgment. The pool of data for the study consisted of 12,960
measurements (120 children × 108 words) To determine the grade-level effect and
the word-type effect as independent variables, Multilevel Binary Logistic Regression
analysis was used. Our first modeling attempt was to assess intra-class correlation
(ICC) indices. Two ICC measurements were calculated, one for the children’s level
(subjects), and the other for the word’s level variance (words).
Table 2 provides the ICC modeling results. The second panel of Table 2 shows an
inter-class correlation of .05 for the children’s level variance (ICC subjects) and .33
for the word level variance (ICC words). This means significant variation across
words and children in the propensity to make a correct judgment. Model 1 is the
unconditional model, that is the intercept not explained by word type and grade.
Model 2 is the fixed-effects part which shows the overall grade and word effects
compared to a reference category. Model 2 was performed twice, once with identical
words as a reference category and once with unique words as a reference category. In
both model runs, the reference-grade category is kindergarten. In addition, the variance
component section in Table 2 (second panel) shows to what extent children differ from
each other and to what extent words differ from each other. Model 2 shows significant
variation across children and words (0.14, p < .001; 1.34, p < .001, respectively).
As Table 2 shows, two main effects were examined to understand differences in
successful performance: grade (L2: Grade level) and word type (L2: Word level).
Effects (the unstandardized b coefficients) are the log odds, or the log ratio of the
probability of successful judgment by a specific category versus that probability of
the reference category. The results for Model 2 represented in Table 2 regarding
grade effect show that while first-graders showed no difference in pronunciation
accuracy judgments in comparison to kindergarten children (b = 1.14, p > .05),
second-graders and sixth-graders did (b = 0.39, p < .01; b = 0.87, p < .001,
respectively). The results of the word-type effect show that identical words were
correctly judged more easily than unique words, 1-consonant distant cognates
(category 3), 2-phoneme distant cognates (category 4), and more than 2-phoneme
distant cognates (category 5) (b = –1.82, p < .001; b = –1.19, p < .01; b = –1.51, p < .01;
b = –1.67, p < .001, respectively). However, identical words were not more
significantly easily judged than 1-vowel distant cognates (category 2). At the same
time, unique words were judged significantly more easily than identical words (b =
1.82, p < .001), and 1-vowel distant cognates (category 2) (b = 1.45, p < .001). Yet,
they were not significantly different in pronunciation accuracy judgment from any of
the other three types of cognates (category 3, 4, 5), not even those which were
distant by just one consonantal phoneme.
Next, we asked whether differences in phonological representations for the different
types of words were different in the different grades. To achieve this, we expanded the
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1386
Grade
Word Type
Kindergarten N = 30
Gr. 1 N = 30
Gr. 2 N = 30
Gr.6 N = 30
All N = 120
Identical words
89.81 (1.04)
92.40 (1.04)
92.96 (1.04)
95.18 (1.04)
92.59 (0.52)
Cognate words: 1-phoneme distant cognates: vowel
88.51 (1.29)
87.40 (1.29)
90.55 (1.29)
90.55 (1.29)
89.26 (0.65)
Cognate words: 1-phoneme distant cognates: consonant
77.22 (1.55)
78.51 (1.55)
83.71 (1.55)
89.63 (1.55)
85.27 (0.77)
Cognate words: 2-phoneme distant cognates
67.40 (1.60)
67.29 (1.60)
75.55 (1.60)
86.48 (1.60)
76.43 (0.80)
Cognate words: More than 2-phoneme distant cognates
72.59 (1.97)
70.11 (1.97)
75.92 (1.97)
82.40 (1.97)
75.26 (0.98)
Cognate words: all
76.43 (6.91)
78.08 (5.88)
81.43 (6.09)
86.26 (5.08)
81.55 (7.26)
Unique words
67.22 (2.05)
69.63 (2.05)
73.33 (2.05)
76.66 (2.05)
71.71 (1.02)
Total
77.13 (1.00)
79.06 (1.00)
82.00 (1.00)
86.82 (1.00)
81.25 (0.50)
Saiegh-Haddad and Haj
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Table 1. Summary Statistics of Pronunciation Accuracy Judgments by Phonological Distance and Grade (N = 120)
Journal of Child Language
1387
Table 2. Cross-Classified Multilevel Binary Logistic Regression: Testing Pronunciation Accuracy Judgment
by Grade and Word Level
Model 1
Model 2
1.93*** (.14)
2.69*** (.31)
Fixed effects
Intercept
L2: grade level
L2: word level
G1 vs. Kindergarten
1.14 (.12)
G2 vs. Kindergarten
0.39** (.12)
G6 vs. Kindergarten
0.87*** (.12)
Category 1: Unique vs. Identical
−1.82*** (.41)
Category 2: Cognate-vowel vs. Identical
−0.37 (.42)
Category 3: Cognate-consonant vs.
Identical
−1.19** (.41)
Category 4: Cognate-2-phoneme vs.
Identical
−1.51*** (.41)
Category 5: Cognate-more than
2-phonemes vs. Identical
−1.67*** (.41)
Category 1: Identical vs. Unique
1.82*** (.41)
Category 2: Cognate-vowel vs. Unique
1.45*** (.40)
Category3: Cognate-consonant vs. Unique
0.63 (.410)
Category 4: Cognate-2-phoneme vs.
Unique
0.31 (.40)
Category 5: Cognate-more than
2-phonemes vs. Unique
0.15 (.40)
Variance components
Level 2 – grades
Level 2 – words
Grade intercept σsubject2
Word intercept
σword2
0.24*** (.49)
0.14*** (.14)
1.75*** (1.32)
1.34*** (1.16)
ICC subjects
0.05
–
ICC words
0.33
–
–
0.10
2
Pseudo R
Notes. Standard errors are in parentheses for fixed effects and Standard deviation for random parameters; ∼ p < .10,
* p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001.
analysis to test all word categories one against the other, for each grade separately.
Results are shown in Table 3.
As can be seen from Table 3, within the group of kindergarteners, identical words
were easier to judge than unique words (b = –1.68, p < .001), and they were easier
than all other types of cognates, except 1-vowel distant cognates (category 2) (b = –
1.11, p < .01, b = −1.64, p < .001, b = –1.44, p < .001). At the same time, 1-vowel
distant cognates were easier than unique words (b = 1.52, p < .001), but no other
significant differences were found between unique words and the other word
categories. The same pattern was replicated among first- and second-graders, but it
changed among sixth-graders. Within the sixth-grade group, cognates distant by one
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Saiegh-Haddad and Haj
Table 3. Cross-Classified Multilevel Binary Logistic Regression Testing Pronunciation Accuracy Judgment
by Word Level for Each Grade Separately
Kindergarten
Intercept
Category 1: Unique vs. Identical
Category 2: Cognate-vowel vs. Identical
Category 3: Cognate-consonant vs. Identical
−1.11** (.42)
−1.64*** (.42)
Category 5: Cognate-more than 2-phonemes vs. Identical
−1.44*** (.42)
0.87** (.28)
Category 1: Identical vs. Unique
1.68*** (.42)
Category 2: Cognate-vowel vs. Unique
1.52*** (.41)
Category 3: Cognate-consonant vs. Unique
0.57 (.40)
Category 4: Cognate-2-phonemes vs. Unique
0.04 (.39)
Category 5: Cognate-more than 2-phonemes vs. Unique
0.24 (.39)
Intercept
Category 1: Unique vs. Identical
Category 2: Cognate-vowel vs. Identical
Category 3: Cognate-consonant vs. Identical
Category 4: Cognate-2-phonemes vs. Identical
Category 5: Cognate-more than 2-phonemes vs. Identical
2.82*** (.32)
−1.80*** (.42)
−0.64 (.43)
−1.36** (.42)
−1.39** (.42)
−1.79*** (.42)
Intercept
1.02*** (.28)
Category 1: Identical vs. Unique
1.80*** (.42)
Category 2: Cognate-vowel vs. Unique
Grade 2
−0.16 (.44)
Category 4: Cognate-2-phonemes vs. Identical
Intercept
Grade 1
2.55*** (.32)
−1.68*** (.42)
1.16** (.40)
Category 3: Cognate-consonant vs. Unique
0.45 (.39)
Category 4: Cognate-2-phonemes vs. Unique
0.41 (.39)
Category 5: Cognate-more than 2-phonemes vs. Unique
0.01 (.38)
Intercept
3.01*** (.39)
Category 1: Unique vs. Identical
−1.68** (.51)
Category 2: Cognate-vowel vs. Identical
Category 3: Cognate-consonant vs. Identical
−0.15 (.54)
−1.08* (.52)
Category 4: Cognate-2-phonemes vs. Identical
−1.53** (.52)
Category 5: Cognate-more than 2-phonemes vs. Identical
−1.62** (.51)
Intercept
1.33*** (.35)
Category 1: Identical vs. Unique
1.68** (.51)
Category 2: Cognate-vowel vs. Unique
1.53** (.51)
Category 3: Cognate-consonant vs. Unique
0.60 (.49)
Category 4: Cognate-2-phonemes vs. Unique
0.16 (.49)
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Journal of Child Language
Category 5: Cognate-more than 2-phonemes vs. Unique
Grade 6
Intercept
Category 1: Unique vs. Identical
1389
0.06 (.48)
3.59*** (.44)
−2.02*** (.56)
Category 2: Cognate-vowel vs. Identical
−0.73 (.58)
Category 3: Cognate-consonant vs. Identical
−0.84 (.58)
Category 4: Cognate-2-phonemes vs. Identical
−1.04 (.57)
Category 5: Cognate-more than 2-phonemes vs. Identical
−1.54** (.56)
Intercept
1.57*** (.37)
Category 1: Identical vs. Unique
2.02*** (.56)
Category 2: Cognate-vowel vs. Unique
1.28* (.53)
Category 3: Cognate-consonant vs. Unique
1.17* (.53)
Category 4: Cognate-2-phonemes vs. Unique
0.98 (.52)
Category 5: Cognate-more than 2-phonemes vs. Unique
0.47 (.51)
Notes. Standard errors are in parentheses for fixed effects and Standard deviation for random parameters; p-value signs:
* p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001.
phoneme (vowel or consonant) and by two phonemes yielded similar accuracy scores to
identical words (category 2, 3, 4). However, unique words and more than 2-phoneme
distant cognates were significantly more difficult than identical words (b = –2.02, p
< .001; b = –1.54, p < .01, respectively). At the same time, only 1-phoneme distant
cognates (1 vowel or 1 consonant) were significantly easier than unique words (b =
1.17, p < .05). The rest of the cognates were not significantly different from unique
words even in this group of sixth-graders.
Discussion
The current study had a two-fold objective. First, to investigate whether phonological
distance between word forms in SpA and StA, which is a predominant phenomenon
in Arabic diglossia (Ferguson, 1959) and a prominent feature of child Arabic
(Saiegh-Haddad & Spolsky, 2014), impacts the ability of young children to establish
and develop accurate phonological representations for StA words, the language of
literacy. Second, to probe whether schooling, and the concomitant exposure to
Standard Arabic and to literacy, results in a significant refinement of phonological
representations among children. The study targeted three classes of StA words. The
first is identical words, which are the closest or the least distant from their form in
SpA because they keep an almost identical form in SpA and StA (e.g., /na:m/ ‘sleep’
or /daftar/ ‘notebook’). The second category is cognate words, which are used in
both SpA and StA but which have a different surface phonological form in each of
them. Words in this class are very heterogeneous and vary in degree of distance
from SpA. Four categories of cognate words were targeted: 1-phoneme distant
cognates; these were further classified into 1-vowel distant cognates and 1-consonant
distant cognates, and 2-phoneme distant cognates (a consonant and a vowel). In
both cases, the distance between the StA and the SpA forms of cognates was
paradigmatic and computable via rule-based phonological transformations, such as
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Saiegh-Haddad and Haj
vowel insertion, vowel change, glottal stop deletion, consonant substitution, etc. The
third class of cognates was more than 2-phoneme distant cognates, and included
words depicting word-specific alterations (e.g., StA /riƷl/; SpA /ɁiƷir ‘leg’). The last
category was unique words, whose StA phonological form was unrelated and
completely different from its form in SpA (StA /miծallah/; SpA /ʃamsiyyih/ ‘umbrella’).
The first question addressed in this study was whether words that vary in degree of
phonological distance/overlap also vary in quality of phonological representation,
despite being equal in familiarity; note that all words used in the study were within
the receptive vocabulary of children. Using children’s ability to judge if the
pronunciation of a picture-supported StA word was accurate or not, the results
showed that phonological distance had a significant and a very strong impact on
phonological representational quality. Moreover, this effect was not limited to young
kindergarten children, but extended to older first- and second-graders, and was
significant even among the sixth-grade comparison group. This finding is compelling
because it shows that, even though children were familiar with the word, they still
found it difficult to judge if pronunciation was accurate when the phonological form
of the word was distant or only partially overlapping with its form in their SpA
dialect. Furthermore, it was found that, in general, the more distant the word was,
the more difficult the task turned out to be, with identical words producing the
highest accuracy scores, unique words producing the lowest scores, and cognate
words mostly faring in between. Similarly, the more similar and overlapping the StA
word was with the children’s SpA dialectal form, the easier it was for them to
correctly judge if it was accurately pronounced or not. These findings imply that
phonological distance between the StA of the word and its form in the spoken
dialect of children interferes with children’s ability to encode an accurate
phonological representation, even when the word is within the receptive vocabulary
of the child. This finding supports the separability of lemma activation processes
(including activation of the semantic features of the word) from phonological
encoding (Levelt, 1989), and it suggests that phonological distance may be a specific
constraint on the phonological encoding process. Alternatively, phonological overlap
between the StA form of the word and its form in the spoken dialect appears to
bootstrap children’s phonological encoding, resulting in higher pronunciation
accuracy judgment performance.
These results have important theoretical implications for phonological
representations in general, and for the factors that impact lexical specificity and
children’s ability to establish and develop high-quality phonological representations.
One important factor that the current results demonstrate is phonological distance/
overlap between the form of the word in the spoken language, or dialect, and its
form in the language of formal discourse and literacy. This factor is fundamental
when conceived within the framework of COMPARATIVE LINGUALITY, and its effect on
language development and metalinguistic skills in bilingual and bilectal children
(Grohmann & Kambanaros, 2016; Rowe & Grohmann, 2013). This is because it
implies that linguistic distance is not a monolithic construct but is a gradable one,
and that its impact on processing is commensurate with degree of distance.
Moreover, these results show that the impact of linguistic distance on processing is
quantifiable and may, hence, be reliably measured (Kambanaros, Michaelides, &
Grohmann, 2017).
The impact of the phonological distance between SpA and StA on phonological
representational quality that this study has demonstrated supports earlier evidence
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Journal of Child Language
1391
endorsing the impact of phonological distance on Arabic-speaking children’s
phonological awareness (Saiegh-Haddad, 2003, 2004, 2007a; Saiegh-Haddad et al.,
2011), letter-naming (Assad & Eviatar, 2013), pseudo-word decoding
(Saiegh-Haddad, 2003, 2005), and word reading (Saiegh-Haddad & Schiff, 2016;
Schiff & Saiegh-Haddad, 2018). It also aligns with evidence for the effect of
phonological distance on word decoding observed among disabled readers (Schiff &
Saiegh-Haddad, 2017) and on typically developing and language impaired children’s
phonological processing in working memory (Saiegh-Haddad & Ghawi-Dakwar,
2017). Given that phonological processing and reading development are predicated
on phonological representations (Elbro, 1998; Goswami, 2000; Katz, 1986; Swan &
Goswami, 1997a, 1997b), the current results suggest that the phonological processing
and reading difficulties encountered by Arabic native-speaking children may be, at
least partly, attributed to difficulty in constructing accurate phonological
representations for StA lexical items in long-term memory. This idea is captured by
MAWRID, a Model of Arabic Word Reading in Development (Saiegh-Haddad, 2017a),
which argues that diglossia and the linguistic distance between SpA and StA governs
the acquisition of basic reading skills across development (Saiegh-Haddad, 2017b).
The observed impact of phonological distance/overlap on phonological
representations has important educational implications for language and reading
instruction too, as well as for assessment and material development for
Arabic-speaking learners. If the phonological distance between the StA form of the
word, which children encounter in reading, and its form in SpA, the form children
use in everyday speech, impacts phonological representations, and in turn probably
also phonological processing and decoding, and if the more distant the word is the
more difficult it is for her to establish an accurate representation for it, then reading
instruction as well as assessment should take this factor into account (SaieghHaddad & Everatt, 2017). This principle of gradability and control over the ‘what’
(which words to use) and ‘when’ (when to introduce different words) questions in
reading curriculum development constitutes a core principle of the Exposurethrough-Reading Program (Saiegh-Haddad & Spolsky, 2014), which is proposed as a
way of bridging the gap between the language of the child and the language of the
book in teaching reading in diglossic Arabic (Saiegh-Haddad & Everatt, 2017).
For instance, instruction in phonemic awareness and decoding should probably start
with StA words that keep an identical phonological form in the SpA dialect spoken by
the children, and then progress gradually to non-overlapping words. This is because
phonological awareness and phonological recoding involve operations on a
phonological representation, and the extent to which this representation is high in
quality would impact phonological analysis (Saiegh-Haddad, 2017c). Furthermore,
instruction should devote particular attention to cognate words. Cognate words are
less accurately represented than identical words because they are only semi-familiar,
and their processing might involve an activation and competition of two
phonological forms – a standard and a spoken form – hence the lower pronunciation
accuracy judgments. Yet cognate words are easier than unique words, probably
because they are only semi-novel and the overlap between the two forms of the word
might bootstrap children’s ability to encode an accurate phonological representation.
Future research should further explore the role of distance/proximity in children’s
phonological representation and processing to shed light on whether partially
overlapping cognate words would always yield a less accurate representation than
completely novel unique words. It might be reasonable to argue that a unique StA
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Saiegh-Haddad and Haj
word that does not encode a StA phoneme might be easier to process than a StA
cognate word that has a competing SpA form in the lexicon of children. Note that
the unique words used in the current study were a combination of unique words
encoding StA phonemes and those not encoding StA phonemes. Earlier research has
shown that unique words that do not encode StA phonemes are easier to process in
memory (using a nonword repetition task) than unique words that do not encode
StA phonemes (Saiegh-Haddad & Ghawi-Dakwar, 2017). This factor may turn out to
be important in clarifying some of the underlying differences in phonological
representation between cognates and different types of unique words, and is a
question is for future research to pursue.
Another question that the current study tested pertained to the developmental
trajectory of phonological representations for the different types of words, and
specifically at the transitional point from preliteracy in kindergarten to literacy in the
first grade. The results of the study showed that the impact of phonological distance
on phonological representations is not transient, and neither is it a characteristic of
the lexicons of young preliterate children. Rather, it is persistent and long-standing
and it extends to literate children in elementary school, as well as to older children
in middle school. At the same time, the results support a developmental progression
in phonological representations with second- and sixth-graders performing generally
higher than kindergarteners and first-graders, yet no developmental difference was
noted between the kindergarten and the first-grade sample. These findings endorse a
beneficial effect of oral exposure to StA and of literacy in StA at school on quality of
phonological representations. At the same time, the finding that first-grade children
were not different from kindergarten children is puzzling, especially when evaluated
in light of earlier findings in other languages which indicate an upsurge in
phonological representational accuracy with the inception of literacy in the first grade
(de Gelder & Vroomen, 1991; Goswami et al., 1999; Swan & Goswami, 1997a). This
unexpected finding might reflect cross-linguistic differences in the challenges that
confront children in constructing phonological representations in different languages.
As such, it might imply that the challenge which diglossia poses to the construction
of high-quality phonological representations might supersede the impact of other
challenges undermining this undertaking in other languages, such as the encoding of
consonantal clusters, for instance. Two features of Arabic are in order: the simple
syllabic structure of Arabic and the transparent orthography of voweled Arabic, the
orthography children learn to read in (Saiegh-Haddad & Henkin-Roitfarb, 2014). It
may be argued that, given the simple syllabic structure of StA, with the absence of
complex consonantal clusters, the contribution of exposure to the shallow
orthography of voweled Arabic to phonological representations in the first grade is
significantly reduced, giving way to extended oral exposure to StA as the main factor.
To address this conjecture, future research should address the question of the relative
effect of oral exposure to StA vis-à-vis exposure to reading in shallow voweled Arabic
orthography on quality of phonological representations.
Besides a general effect of phonological distance on phonological representations
reflected as greatest facility with pronunciation accuracy judgment for identical
words, followed by cognates and then unique words, the results of the study showed
an interesting pattern of results: 1-vowel distant cognates were indistinguishable from
identical words, whereas the rest of the cognates, namely categories 1–3 (1-consonant
distant, 2-phoneme distant, and more than 2-phoneme distant cognates) were all
indistinguishable from unique words (Table 2). This pattern of results was unaltered
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Journal of Child Language
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in the three younger groups: kindergarten, first grade, and second grade (Table 3). This
finding is outstanding and it shows that cognate words, which are usually regarded as
easy to recognize by children because they are half similar and their forms in StA and
StA are overlapping, are in fact not as accurately represented and may therefore not be
as easily accessible or retrievable by children as they are often assumed to be. This has
important implications for the acquisition of decoding skills in young children
(Verhoeven et al., 2016) and of reading comprehension later on (Nouwens et al.,
2018). Note that cognate words that vary in just one or two paradigmatic rule-based
phonological change parameters, such as a consonant substitution (StA /ծahab/; SpA
/dahab/ ‘gold’) or word-final glottal stop deletion plus preceding vowel reduction
(e.g., StA /sama:ʔ/; SpA /sama/ ‘sky’), were more difficult to judge than identical
words and, unexpectedly, not significantly easier than unique words. This finding
should be taken very seriously in Arabic language and reading instruction and
assessment, especially in light of widespread folk wisdom usually endorsed by
educational policy-makers, according to whom, if a StA word also exists in SpA (i.e.,
is a cognate) or “has its origin in StA” as some put it, it should not cause any
difficulty for children. This finding should be equally heeded in Arabic
psycholinguistic research, especially when the research design relies heavily on
word-based manipulations.
The finding that 1-vowel distant cognates aligned with identical words and were
significantly different from 1-consonant distant cognates might also imply a different
status of vowels versus consonants in the Arabic lexicon. The results showed that
when StA cognate words varied from their SpA form in just one vowel, they were
indistinguishable from identical words. This was not the case for a StA cognate that
varied from its SpA form in one consonant. This suggests greater salience of Arabic
consonants over vowels, and may be attributed to the fact that Arabic is a
consonantal root-based language in which the meaning of the word is carried mainly
on its consonantal structure (Saiegh-Haddad & Henkin-Roitfarb, 2014). In contrast,
vowels are mostly part of the word pattern template, which encodes the word’s
grammatical properties, and these tend to vary in different dialects, and even within
StA for variants of the same template. Evidence in support of this hypothesis comes
from research showing that awareness of the consonantal root morpheme in Arabic
develops early, and before awareness of the word-pattern morpheme (Taha &
Saiegh-Haddad, 2017). Moreover, research shows that morphological processing
using the consonantal root is observed in spelling and reading in young children
(Saiegh-Haddad & Taha, 2017), and is more common among young children than
morphological processing using the word-pattern (Saiegh-Haddad, 2013). To directly
test the hypothesis that consonants may be psycholinguistically more salient than
vowels, future research should directly compare phonological awareness for Arabic
vowels versus consonants (Saiegh-Haddad, 2017b).
Thus, cognates were found to behave in different ways depending on the type of
distance, with 1-vowel distant cognates being indistinguishable from identical words
and with the rest of the cognates indistinguishable from unique words. This pattern
was replicated in the three younger groups of children and was only different in the
sixth grade (Table 3). In the latter group, all cognate words except category 4 (more
than 2-phoneme distant cognates) aligned with identical words. However, category 4
of cognates aligned with unique words. This observation is compelling, especially in
light of the fact that all other cognates (category 1–3) depict a phonological distance
between StA and SpA that is regular, paradigmatic, and rule-based, i.e., that the SpA
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1394
Saiegh-Haddad and Haj
form may be computed from the StA form by applying a set of phonological processes,
whereas category 4 (more than 2-phneme distant) depict word-specific phonological
alterations. This finding implies that children might find it easier to develop accurate
phonological representation for StA words whose distance from SpA is paradigmatic
and whose StA forms are regularly related to their form in SpA, yet they only appear
to show this advantage in the sixth grade. In contrast, younger children find all
cognate words, even those that regularly alternate with their SpA form in just one
consonant, indistinguishable from unique words. This advantage observed in
sixth-graders as against all the other three younger groups might reflect the
combined effect of extended exposure to StA (6 years as against 1–3 years in
kindergarten and second grade, respectively), as well as extended experience with
literacy in the transparent orthography of Arabic. Extended exposure to StA
enhances children’s ability to extract statistical patterns from the language, including
patterns that govern the relationship between StA forms and their paradigmatically
related SpA parallel forms, and this could in turn lead to greater grasp and
awareness of these transformations as reflected in higher pronunciation accuracy
judgments. Research supports a fast increase in linguistic awareness – phonological
and morphological – during the first six years of literacy instruction among Arabic
native-speaking children (Saiegh-Haddad & Taha, 2017). One outcome of enhanced
phonological and morphological awareness may be increased awareness of the
phonological and morphophonological differences and similarities between lexical
items as they are used in SpA and StA, and this might bootstrap phonological
encoding in memory, as reflected in performance on our task. A second factor could
be extended literacy experience with the orthography of Arabic in general and with
unvoweled Arabic in particular. Children are taught how to read using the voweled
Arabic orthography, and they only start reading in unvoweled Arabic approximately
around the fourth grade. Developing reading fluency in unvoweled Arabic appears to
be particularly dependent on morphological processing skills, in addition to
phonological skills (Saiegh-Haddad & Taha, 2017; Schiff & Saiegh-Haddad, 2018).
This is because the unvoweled word is morphologically transparent and because
morphological awareness (especially pattern awareness) enables the reader to recover
the missing vocalic information that is mapped by the diacritics (Saiegh-Haddad,
2017a). It may be argued that enhanced morphological processing in reading
unvoweled Arabic contributes to enhanced awareness of the linguistic relatedness of
SpA and StA lexical items. This may be especially so as phonological distance/
overlap may be obscured in speech yet preserved in the spellings of words. It is
noteworthy in this respect that Arabic spelling is loyal to morphological structure
(root and word pattern) and, given strong velarization assimilation processes
operating on the phonological form of the word, yet not represented in its spelling
(Saiegh-Haddad, 2013), morphological processing might be particularly conducive to
awareness of the linguistic distance/overlap between SpA and StA forms of words.
This question is for future research to explore. Future research should also test
children’s knowledge of SpA-StA transformations and their ability to apply these
transformations to unfamiliar or pseudo-word stimuli, as well as the relationship
between this ability, phonological representations, and statistical learning. This
avenue may turn out to be critical for understanding individual variations in
children’s ability to develop a range of language and literacy skills in Arabic diglossia
(Saiegh-Haddad, 2017b). Future research should also test the role of awareness of
cognates and of cognate training in bootstrapping vocabulary acquisition. Also,
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Journal of Child Language
1395
whether cognate training would have the same impact on phonological representations
in bilingual contexts (e.g., Kambanaros et al., 2017).
Conclusion and limitations
The results of the current study demonstrate the psychological reality of phonological
distance in Arabic diglossia, reflected as differences in the phonological
representational quality for different StA words in the lexicons of Arabic
native-speaking children. The results show that the accuracy with which the
phonological form of StA words is represented may be predicted by the relative
distance or overlap of the StA word from its form in SpA, with the least distant
words, the identical words which preserve an identical phonological form in SpA
and StA, showing the most accurate representations. In contrast, cognate words,
including those that are distant by a single consonant or more, show lower level of
representational accuracy, which may be as low as the representation of unique
words which have two completely different forms in SpA and StA. Interestingly, we
also found that enhancement of phonological representations in Arabic is very slow
and not evident in the early school grades, and certainly not by the transition from
orality to literacy in the first grade. These results have significant and far-reaching
implications for language and literacy acquisition and education in diglossic Arabic.
Two critical limitations on the generalizability of the results of this study are
warranted: sample size and socio-cultural context. The findings we report in this
study are based on a sample of 120 children. Future research should aim for a larger
sample. Moreover, the results are based on Arabic native-speaking children living in
Israel. These children are monolingual native speakers of Arabic and they attend
Arabic-medium instruction schools, in which Hebrew is taught as a second language
starting in the third grade only. Nonetheless, the presence of Hebrew in the linguistic
landscape of Israel and in the linguistic repertoire of young children in Israel is not
to be overlooked. Future research is needed that replicates the current study among
speakers of Arabic living in other regions in the Arabic-speaking world.
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Appendix
Examples of stimulus items by word category (Identical, Cognate, Unique) and condition (real, pseudo).
Bold symbols indicate location and identity of consonant substitution.
Identical words
Real word
Stimulus
in Arabic
Pseudo-word
Real word
Meaning
Stimulus
in Arabic
َﺣ ّﻤﺎﻡ
/ħamma:
m/
bathroom
ﻀﺔ
َ َﺧﺮﻳ
َﺟ َﺮﺱ
/Ʒaras/
bell
َﺟﻨَﻞ
Phonological
change
Pseudoword
Target
word
Meaning
Voicing
/xari:da/
/xari:ta/
map
Place of
articulation
/Ʒanal/
/Ʒamal/
camel
Cognate words
One-vowel distant cognates
َﻭ ْﺣﺶ
/wa ʃћ/
monster
َﻧ ْﻌﺮ
Manner of articulation
/naʕr/
/nahr/
river
ِﺣﻤﺎﺭ
/ћima:r/
donkey
َﻣ ْﺤﻠَﺔ
Place of articulation
/maћla/
/naћla/
bee
One-consonant distant cognates
َﺛ ْﻌﻠَﺐ
/θaʕlab/
fox
َﺳ ْﻴﺖ
Voicing
/sayt/
/zayt/
oil
َﺳ ْﻴﻒ
/sayf/
sword
ًﺑﺬﻳﻊ
Manner of
articulation
/buði: :ʕ/
/muðiʕ /
broadcaster
Two-phoneme-distant cognates: one vowel and one consonant
َﺳ ْﻘﻒ
/saqf/
roof
َﻗ ْﻨﺢ
Manner of
articulation
/qanћ/
/qamћ/
wheat
/saћra:ʔ/
desert
ﻓﺄﻝ
Place of
articulation
/faʔl/
/faʔr/
mouse
ﺻ ْﺤﺮﺍﺀ
َ
More than two-phoneme distant cognates
ﺣﺎﺋِﻂ
/ћa:ʔit/
Wall
ﻓﺎ ِﻛ َﺤﺔ
Place of
articulation
/fakeћa/
/fakeha/
fruit
ﺷﺎ ِﻃﺊ
/ʃa:teʔ/
beach
ﺯﺍ ِﺭﻕ
Voicing
/za:req/
/sa:req/
thief
Unique words
َﺳﺮﻳﺮ
/sari:r/
bed
ِﺣﺰﺍﻥ
Place of
articulation
/ћiza:n/
/ћiza:m/
belt
ًﻗ َّﺒ َﻌﺔ
/qubbaʕa
hat
ًﺛ ْﻌﺪﺍﻥ
Place of
articulation
/θuʕdan/
/θuʕban/
snake
Cite this article: Saiegh-Haddad E, Haj L (2018). Does phonological distance impact quality of
phonological representations? Evidence from Arabic diglossia. Journal of Child Language 45, 1377–1399.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000918000302
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