This 4-year project is a multi-disciplinary and international collaboration bringing together a team of linguists, psychologists, speech and language therapists, paediatricians and educators to develop the necessary knowledge and tools to address the lack of culturally sensitive and standardised tools to measure language development in Arabic-speaking children (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and West Bank), as a primary indicator of healthy development and the foundation skill for education.
For this, we need to show the feasibility of a multi-dialect approach, and we need to quantify the effects of social disadvantage, multilingualism and childcare mode on language development. We also need to estimate how war-related traumas impact trajectories of language development in the region. Finally, we need to raise awareness of the importance of early language skills in the public and policymakers, empower end-users with tools to screen children for language delays and provision for language-centred curricula, and disseminate the expertise of local practitioners for prevention and interventions.
