Abstract
Research on specific language impairment in Arabic-speaking children is currently nonexistent. Distinct linguistic characteristics of Arabic make it valuable as a means of studying manifestations of language impairment and providing insights into the nature of SLI. The study aimed to provide a linguistic profile of Arabic speaking children with SLI to help meticulous diagnosis and in the choice of proper lines of intervention strategies. This study included 135 children of both sexes with age range (4-9) years. They were diagnosed as SLI by using the Arabic language test. Descriptive statistics done for all study group then subjects were classified: 1- According to the age into 5 subgroup to detect and analyze the age-related effects on their linguistic performance. I - According to the clinical and linguistic profiles into mixed receptive-expressive type (R-E), expressive type (EX) and phonological type (Ph). It was found that 33.3% SLI children were mixed receptive-expressive (G1) subtype, 17.8% were expressive (G2) subtype and 48.9 % were phonological (G3) subtype. The most affected language parameters were the phonology. syntax both receptive and expressive with a more affection of the expressive part, then the pragmatic. Semantics was the least affected. Prosody was normal. The most frequent syntactic errors were verb tense, preposition, negation, superlatives, pronouns, adverbs and plurals. As regard phonology substitution errors were the most frequent type to occur with the phonemes /g/,/d/,/r/,z/,/d/,/s/are the most frequently affected phonemes. The devoicing, gliding are the commonest substitution errors and the final position of the words are the commonest to be affected.