What Predicts Listening Comprehension in Standard Arabic? The Interdependence of Linguistic and Metalinguistic Skills in Spoken and Standard Arabic

PURPOSE: All Arabic-speaking children grow up in diglossia. They use a Spoken Arabic (SpA) variety for everyday speech but Modern Standard Arabic (StA), a linguistically distant variety, for all literacy-related spheres of use including reading and writing. Given this sociofunctional complementarity, children are continuously required to shift between the spoken and standard varieties. The study tested the contribution of executive functions (EFs) and of linguistic and metalinguistic skills in SpA and StA to listening comprehension (LC) in StA among kindergarten children. METHOD: A total of 775 Palestinian Arabic-speaking children were tested on LC and sentence processing in StA, on EFs (inhibition, switching, memory), and on parallel linguistic (vocabulary and lexico-phonological representations) and metalinguistic (phonological and morphological awareness) skills in SpA and in StA independently. RESULTS: Structural equation modeling showed that all three EF skills were indirectly related to LC via linguistic and metalinguistic skills in SpA and StA, yet working memory showed a direct contribution as well. With respect to linguistic and metalinguistic skills, the results showed that these were interrelated across the two language varieties. Moreover, SpA skills were related to LC indirectly, via their corresponding skills in the StA, yet importantly also directly. CONCLUSIONS: The study demonstrates the centrality of EFs in LC in StA. Furthermore, they underscore the interdependence of linguistic and metalinguistic skills in SpA and StA as well as the direct and indirect contribution of language and metalinguistic skills in the spoken variety to comprehension in StA. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.30676223.