Semantic Memory in Arabic-Speaking Children with Language Delays

This study involves a linguistic-cognitive approach to language delay (LD) by revealing the process of semantic memory (SM) in the Arabic-speaking child according to the specificity of the Arabic language. The study aimed to answer a fundamental question about the contribution of the correlation between SM and LD in Arabic-speaking children. A sample of 32 children with LD was based on an experimental approach, including language, SM, and mental abilities tests. The results of the study found that understanding the nature of LD comes from understanding its relation to SM. We explain language impairment as a disorder in the SM processes that appear in both semantic organization and retrieval, with an advantage for retrieval. The specificity of the Arabic language in its derivation, richness, and morphological structure contributed to increasing the level of lexical access and thus the richness of the mental lexicon, and from it, the processing of language knowledge at the level of SM varies according to the features of the language.