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The Contribution of Linguistic and Cognitive Measures to Listening Comprehension among Arabic-speaking Kindergartners

ABSTRACT Listening comprehension (LC) is considered an important but complex skill that predicts later reading comprehension in various languages. In this study, we aimed at understanding the relationship of LC with different linguistic and cognitive components. For this purpose, 262 Arabic-speaking kindergartners participated in this study. Our regression results showed that both linguistic and cognitive measures explained 53% of the variance in LC. Regarding the linguistic measures, while vocabulary, syntactic knowledge and morphological knowledge contributed significantly to LC, the phonological awareness contribution was not significant. As for the cognitive measures, both working memory and speed of processing were found to contribute significantly to LC whereas the contribution of speed of processing was marginal. Our findings are discussed in the light of previous findings in the literature.