Disfluency in the native language of Arab-American children

Minority languages existing in contact with a dominant second language have been shown to undergo a process of attrition or loss. Research in this area emphasizes the role of interference of the dominant language in the process of attrition or loss. Little is known about the situation of Arabic in the US due to the rarity of research on this language. This study was designed to investigate the associations that certain demographic, social and psychological factors have with disfluency in the native language. The study also investigated the characteristics of different types of deviations in the native language by looking at the role of interference, markedness, specificity of meaning and language disuse in the occurrence of these errors. This study found that, among the different types of hesitations, only long silent pauses are associated with disfluency in the native language. In this study, long silent pauses and linguistic deviations are viewed as markers of disfluency in the native language, rather than as markers of language loss, because the children may not yet have had the opportunity to have learned all aspects of the native language.;Fifty-eight Arab-American children attending a private full-time Arabic school in Dallas, Texas, participated in this study. To elicit data about the demographic, social, and psychological factors, as well as language samples, the children filled in a questionnaire designed for this purpose and recounted a children's story by looking at a wordless picture book (FROG, WHERE ARE YOU?, by Mercer Mayer). The results showed that the self-evaluation method used in many studies on language change and language loss is not valid. They also showed that the use of language at home, parents' birthplace, and attitude towards Arabic are the factors that correlate the most with the disfluency units and with the other social and psychological factors and that the factors of discrimination and gender display the least correlations among all factors. It was also found that interference from English plays a minor role in the occurrence of deviations in the lexicon and that markedness and language disuse play more important roles in disfluency.