BASELINE DATA FOR ARABIC ACQUISITION WITH CLINICAL APPLICATIONS: E-CONTENT CHALLENGES TO-DATE

"Baseline Data for Arabic Acquisition with Clinical Applications" a three-year interdisciplinary project in Linguistics and Children’s Health funded by the Qatar National Research Fund. The project is multi-institutional and international. The overall goal is to amass an extensive new body of knowledge about normal Arabic first language acquisition and make it available on the internet. The new online material will be used by linguistic researchers to more fully understand the developmental sequence for Arabic. This is essential for a fuller understanding of language acquisition as a human cognitive capacity, especially because Arabic, in its several varieties, has many typologically unusual properties. The new online material will also be used by speech-language pathologists working with Arabic-speaking children, to prevent misdiagnosis and mistreatment and to improve the quality of life of the children they work with and their families. This presentation outlines the project's challenges to-date in its e-gathering and coding of new data, and preparations to make them and other project products available as e-content to researchers and clinicians around the world.