Baseline data for Arabic acquisition with clinical applications: Some phonological processes in Qatari children’s speech

Abstract

This paper has two aims. The first is to inform our language acquisition colleagues about the “Baseline Data for Arabic Acquisition with Clinical Applications” project, which is a multi-institutional and international three-year interdisciplinary project in Linguistics and Children’s Health. It is a crosssectional study of children’s speech that involves research on normal conversational interactions by native Arabic-speaking children between the ages of 1 year and 4 months and 3 years and 7 months. The goal is to collect extensive new material on four colloquial Arabic dialects: Qatari, Jordanian, Palestinian, and Lebanese. The second aim is the presentation of some results about phonological processes observed in the speech of young Qatari children, based on the databases. The paper gives a small taste of the kind of data the Qatar team is encountering including a discussion of practical difficulties in doing the work. We hope this will be helpful for fellow researchers who do child language research in the Arab Gulf region.