The author's Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1912. / Slip with printed thesis note inserted before the title-page. Bibliography: p. [xiii]-xiv.

Originally issued as the author's Thesis (inaugural)--Leipzig. / Includes bibliographical references and index.

Thesis--Copenhagen. / Includes bibliographical references.

Nonword repetition has received great attention in the last three decades due to its ability to distinguish between the performance of children with language impairment and their typically developing peers and due to its correlation with variety of language abilities, especially vocabulary skills. This study investigates early phonological skills, as represented by nonword repetition (NWR), in TD Gulf Arabic speaking children and those with language impairment and tries to examine findings in relation to two important NWR hypotheses, namely the phonological short term memory account (PSTM, Gathercole& Baddeley, 1990a) and the linguistic account of Snowling, Chiat & Hulme (1991). In the first experiment, a new Arabic word and nonword test (WNRep) was developed and conducted with 44 TD children and a clinical group (CL) that consisted of 15 children with language impairment. The participants’ ages were between two and four years old. The results show that the TD group scored significantly higher than the CL group on the WNRep and across one, two and three syllable words/nonwords and that NWR scores correlated significantly with receptive and expressive vocabulary tests. Apart from its ability to differentiate between TD and those with language impairment, NWR results revealed significant differences in groups’ performance even on one syllable word and nonwords, which differs from findings in other languages. These results raise questions about whether these findings relate to the characteristic root and pattern morphology in Arabic. Therefore, the second experiment in chapter 5 was conducted to investigate the effects of roots and patterns on TD children’s repetition skills and their relation to receptive and expressive vocabulary tests. A root and pattern nonword repetition test (RAP-NWR) was developed to measure this effect. The RAP-NWR consisted of three different types of root and pattern combinations (real root and nonpattern nonwords, real pattern and nonroot nonwords and nonpattern and nonroot nonwords). All 89 participants were TD Gulf Arabic speaking children aged two to seven years old and divided into six age bands. Results showed that these children’s repetitions were sensitive to the presence of roots but not patterns and that RAP-NWR scores were significantly correlated with both vocabulary tests. Findings from both studies show that while phonological storage may explain some of the results of children’s performance on NWR, there are a myriad of phonological and morphological factors that could have significant effects on NWR, such as the effects of roots and patterns, and it seems that roots more important role to play as it roots awareness emerges earlier than pattern awareness. Based on these findings, clinical utility of root and pattern NWR tests is discussed and further investigations of effects of roots and patterns on NWR are recommended.

Background: Sentence Repetition (SR) is considered to be a good indicator of children’s grammatical knowledge. Cross-linguistic evidence suggests that performance on SR improves with age, differentiates children with language difficulties, and shows relationships with other language assessments. However, there is debate about the underlying skills involved in SR with few studies directly investigating the impact of linguistic manipulation on SR performance. In the absence of standardized language assessments and lack of normative data, and building on evidence from typologically diverse languages, SR provides a potentially useful assessment tool in Arabic. Aims: (1) To examine the clinical utility of a novel SR test and an adapted Verbal Short Term Memory (VSTM) test by investigating the psychometric properties of the tests and their sensitivity to age and language ability. (2) To evaluate the contribution of established linguistic knowledge to immediate repetition by comparing the patterns of performance across different linguistic factors 3) To determine whether patterns of performance are similar or dissimilar across different age groups of Typically Developing children and different language ability groups. Methods: Three immediate repetition tests were developed or adapted: (1) a novel SR test targeting morphosyntactic structures of Arabic; (2) an adapted VSTM test based on the structure of the Working Memory Test Battery for Children (WMTB-C; Pickering & Gathercole, 2001) with three subtests of Digit Recall, Word List Recall, and Nonword List Recall; and (3) an Anomalous Sentence Repetition (ASR) test including sets of Semantically Anomalous and Syntactically Anomalous sentences created from and matched to a subset of sentences in the SR test in target Lexical and Grammatical Morphemes as well as length. The SR and ASR tests were scored for the number of Lexical and Grammatical Morphemes repeated correctly. VSTM tests were scored based on the highest number of items repeated in correct order. The SR and VSTM tests were administered to Typically Developing Arabic-speaking children aged 2;6 to 5;11 (n = 140) and a Language Concerns group in the same age range (n = 16), matched on age and nonverbal IQ. The ASR test was only administered to participants older than 4 years. Results: The SR and VSTM tests were reliable, valid, and sensitive to age and language ability of participants. In the Typical sample a) Lexical Morphemes were easier to repeat than Grammatical Morphemes, (b) Digit span was higher than Word span and Word span was higher than Nonword span, and (c) Typical sentences were easier to repeat than Semantically Anomalous sentences followed by Syntactically Anomalous sentences. The gap between Digit and Word span, Grammatical and Lexical Morphemes in the SR test and Lexical Morphemes in Typical and Semantically Anomalous sentences showed a change with age. While performance was significantly reduced in the Language Concerns group, the profile of performance was largely similar. Like the younger children in the Typical sample, they showed a greater vulnerability in Grammatical Morphemes. Only four of 16 children in the clinical sample showed mismatches between their performance on the SR and VSTM tests. Conclusions: The study’s results are consistent with cross-linguistic evidence demonstrating that SR and VSTM tests are sensitive to developmental change and language difficulties and are informative about children’s language processing abilities. These findings lay the foundations for creating standardized assessments for Arabic-speaking preschool children.

Neo-Babylonian (NB) was the last surviving dialect of the Semitic language known as Akkadian and it was still being used for the compilation of records at the beginning of our era. Many thousands of NB economic and legal documents and letters exist, particularly from the sixth century B.C., yet the language is still to be studied, as the various ways in which a word could be spelled suggested it was no longer coherent as a language and therefore that it was not worth studying. Aramaic was presumed to have taken over. I have attempted to find out if this is the case by making a synchronic grammatical study of the NB dialects of Babylon and Uruk from 556 to 500 B.C. These cities have been chosen because they have produced considerable amounts of material. The period also spans the Persian conquest of 539 B.C. Part one deals with syntax and morphology. Consistency of syntactical patterns indicates that NB was a living and evolving language and that the influence of Aramaic and Old Persian was minimal. Part two deals with orthography and suggestions on pronunciation and stress. The main difficulty in establishing how much NB has changed from earlier phases of Akkadian (including earlier NB) lies in understanding how the loss of short final vowels has changed word shape. The extent to which words could end in consonant clusters is not clear as cuneiform is unable to represent consonant clusters in word final position. I conclude that the lack of difference between the NB dialects of Babylon and Uruk suggests that efforts were being made to preserve the language and that the scribal teaching methods must have been similar in the two cities.

This dissertation presents experimental research on speech errors in Tunisian Arabic (TA). The central empirical questions revolve around properties of `exchange errors'. These errors can mis-order lexical, morphological, or sound elements in a variety of patterns. TA's nonconcatenative morphology shows interesting interactions of phrasal and lexical constraints with morphological structure during language production and affords different and revealing error potentials linking the production system with linguistic knowledge.The dissertation studies expand and test generalizations based on Abd-El-Jawad and Abu-Salim's (1987) study of spontaneous speech errors in Jordanian Arabic by experimentally examining apparent regularities in data from real-time language processing perspective. The studies address alternative accounts of error phenomena that have figured prominently in accounts of production processing. Three experiments were designed and conducted based on an error elicitation paradigm used by Ferreira and Humphreys (2001). Experiment 1 tested within-phrase exchange errors focused on root versus non-root exchanges and lexical versus non-lexical outcomes for root and non-root errors. Experiments 2 and 3 addressed between-phrase exchange errors focused on violations of the Grammatical Category Constraint (GCC).The study of exchange potentials for the within-phrase items (experiment 1) contrasted lexical and non-lexical outcomes. The expectation was that these would include a significant number of root exchanges and that the lexical status of the resulting forms would not preclude error. Results show that root and vocalic pattern exchanges were very rare and that word forms rather than root forms were the dominant influence in the experimental performance. On the other hand, the study of exchange errors across phrasal boundaries of items that do or do not correspond in grammatical category (experiments 2 and 3) pursued two principal questions, one concerning the error rate and the second concerning the error elements. The expectation was that the errors predominantly come from grammatical category matches. That outcome would reinforce the interpretation that processing operations reflect the assignment of syntactically labeled elements to their location in phrasal structures. Results corroborated with the expectation. However, exchange errors involving words of different grammatical categories were also frequent. This has implications for speech monitoring models and the automaticity of the GCC.

Inspired by Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), this thesis reconsiders ‘the secular’ from within the discipline of literature and theology, employing comparative literature as a methodology. Focusing on the writings of two modern authors of religious doubt, Graham Greene and Naguib Mahfouz, I argue that the secular as an ontological category is from its inception post secular. In the first theoretical part of this thesis, I explore religious utopianism, and argue against the notion that utopianism is a uniquely ‘Western’ concept by outlining its prevalence in non Western societies. Then, I theorise modern intimations of the secular as four dichotomies: faith/reason, this worldliness/otherworldliness, personal/communal and freewill/determinism. In doing so,I draw parallels between ideas of the secular from Western philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche and classical Islamic thinkers like Ibn Sina and al-Farabi. Drawing from the concepts of ‘religious utopianism’ and ‘secular dichotomies’, I develop a comparative literary lens known as utopian theologics to explore secular narratives in the selected works of Greene and Mahfouz. The second part of this thesis applies utopian theologics, by first historicising the secular from the socio-political and biographical spheres of the two writers to map out their ‘lifeworlds’ in the Habermasian sense of the word. More elaborately, I embark on a close reading analysis of the selected works according to the dichotomies identified to explore the way their conventional hierarchical orders have been reversed, or rendered irrelevant by hybridisation. Finally, I conclude that the secular disposition, as intimated in the novels, falls apart when its polemics are investigated, though its sense of lasting realness in the modern world is fuelled by perceptions of religion’s seeming antithesis to the idea of human agency. The postsecular narratives that govern the selected works also suggest that humanity has an inclination for ‘sacred impulses’ despite the advent of ‘sacrilegious worlds’.

Thesis (M.A.R.)--Emmanuel School of Religion, 2005. / Vita. Subtitle appears in Hebrew script. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 76-98).

Thesis (Th. M.)--Capital Bible Seminary, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 145-150).