Muna
Abd El-Raziq
Dr. Muna Abd El-Raziq was awarded a Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship to pursue her research at the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders at New York University under Professor Sudha Arunachalam. Her project, titled "Lexical Abilities in Monolingual and Bilingual Arabic-Speaking Children with and without Autism," examines how bilingualism and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) influence lexical development. Using eye-tracking and parents’ reports, she will compare Arabic- and English-speaking monolinguals and Arabic-English bilinguals with and without ASD, investigating the impact of Arabic diglossia and complex morphology on lexical comprehension. This study addresses a significant gap by focusing on Arabic-speaking children, underrepresented in autism research.
Muna earned her BA and MA in communication disorders from Tel Aviv University and completed her PhD in linguistics (in clinical research) at Bar-Ilan University, under Professors Natalia Meir and Elinor Saiegh-Haddad. Her doctoral research examined language profiles of Palestinian-Arabic speaking children with and without ASD across phonology, morphosyntax, and lexicon in diglossic context, linking these domains with theory of mind and cognitive skills, with theoretical and practical implications for individualized profiling.
She has received awards including the BSF Professor Rahamimoff Travel Grant, Dean’s Award for Academic Excellence, the President’s Prize for Published Research, and Bar-Ilan University’s Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Her recent publications:
Abd El-Raziq, M., Saiegh-Haddad, E., & Meir, N. (2025). Language, Theory of Mind, and Cognitive skills in autistic and non-autistic Arabic-speaking children: Evidence from Network and Cluster analyses. Journal of Communication Disorders.
Abd El-Raziq, M., Meir, N., & Saiegh-Haddad, E. (2024). Morphosyntactic skills in Arabic-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder: Evidence from error patterns in the sentence repetition task. Autism & Developmental Language Impairments, 9. https://doi.org/10.1177/23969415241234649
Abd El-Raziq, M., Meir, N., & Saiegh-Haddad, E. (2024). Lexical skills in children with and without autism in Arabic diglossia: Evidence from vocabulary and narrative tasks. Language Acquisition, 31(3-4), 199 - 223. https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2023.2268615
