All Arabic-speaking children including 26% of the children in Israel grow up in ‘diglossia’. They acquire a spoken Arabic dialect as their mother tongue and use it for all everyday communicative functions but towards school entry, around the age of 5-6, they are required to develop literacy in Standard Arabic (the language of reading and writing) which differs from the spoken language in all language domains. There is currently no standardized tool for assessing Spoken Arabic for children aged 3-6 years, neither in Israel nor in the world, that takes the diglossic context into consideration.
The proposed study is based on previous studies conducted in our lab (Elinor Saiegh-Haddad and Sharon Armon-Lotem) including an Israel Science Foundation study (ISF 454/18) which examined the feasibility of tools for assessing Spoken Arabic in preschool years (for typical and atypical development). In the ISF study which constitutes the basis of the current proposal, data were collected from 360 children with typical language development and 130 children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), with tasks developed and adapted for dialects of Palestinian Arabic (PA) spoken in Israel. 
The proposed study will be conducted in two phases. In the first stage, a tool will be extracted from our previous studies that will address all language domains previously shown to challenge children with DLD. To reduce dialectal variation, linguistic structures of Standard Arabic that exist in most dialects of PA be targeted. The items in all areas will progress in complexity so that the tool is suitable for children aged 3-6 years. The tool will test vocabulary (picture naming), phonological memory (nonword repetition), phonological awareness (phonological matching), morphological knowledge (sentence completion), syntactic and morpho-syntactic knowledge (sentence repetition), and narrative knowledge (story production). The tool will be tested in a pilot study with 90 children with typical development in three age groups and in a similar number of children with DLD. In the second phase, data will be collected from 900 children (six groups separated by six months, 150 children in each age group from 3-6 years) in regular kindergartens to construct developmental norms. These norms will be tested with 180 children diagnosed with DLD (30 children from each age group) to test the accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity of the tool. 
The tool is expected to differentiate between children with typical development and children with DLD providing norms for language development in Spoken Arabic between ages 3-6 years with high accuracy, sensitivity and specificity. The tool that will be developed and the associated norms will enable early identification and profiling of children with DLD in the various language domains that can inform individually tailored intervention.