Developmental language disorders across-languages : a review and implications for practice and research in Arabic

الملخص EN

Studies of children with Developmental Language Disorders (DLD) in a wide variety of languages revealed diverse clinical linguistic markers, most of which seem to reflect weaknesses in several areas of language including phonological, morpho-syntactic and pragmatic domains.

However, the main altered language aspect in DLD across-languages has been most acknowledged in grammar functioning.

We review the characteristic manifestations of DLD with focus on the variability of these manifestations as sensitive aspect to the type of language being acquired including Arabic.

A summary of relevant research studies is provided showing that the characteristics of DLD can be very different across languages in terms of the types of errors made by children with DLD.

These differences are more noticeable between distant orthographic systems as between Indo-European languages and Arabic.

We conclude our review by practical implications for assessment and research in Arabic language.