Dr. Tala Nazzal from An-Najah University Develops First Linguistic Corpus of Palestinian Arabic and Publishes Study in Leading Journal
Dr. Tala Nazzal, from the Department of Speech Pathology at An-Najah National University, has developed the first-ever linguistic corpus of the Palestinian Arabic dialect, officially listed on the CHILDES platform, a leading international resource for child language research.
The Nazzal Corpus features spontaneous conversations between children (aged 19–56 months) and their interlocutors, containing 7,554 child utterances and 8,703 child-directed utterances. It supports linguistic research in syntax, structure, vocabulary, phonology, and interaction patterns, addressing the lack of published data on Palestinian Arabic, and offering a rare Arabic resource besides Egyptian.
This work was done in collaboration with Professor Brian MacWhinney of Carnegie Mellon University, ensuring alignment with global research standards.
Dr. Nazzal also co-authored a research paper with Professor Anna Gavarró of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, titled:
“A corpus analysis of child and child-directed speech in Palestinian Arabic: A first approach to syntactic development.”
It was published in the Journal of Child Language, ranked Q1 globally, with an Impact Factor of 1.7, and issued by Cambridge University Press.
Corpus: https://talkbank.org/childes/access/Other/Arabic/Nazzal.html
Article: https://doi.org/10.1017/S030500092510007X
