Related Papers
First Language
Breaking into the Hebrew verb system: A learning problem
2016 •
Steven Gillis
Verb learning is an important part of linguistic acquisition. The present study examines the early phases of verb acquisition in Hebrew, a language with complex derivational and inflectional verb morphology, analyzing verbs in dense recordings of CDS and CS of two Hebrew-speaking parent–child dyads aged 1;8–2;2. The goal was to pinpoint those cues that help toddlers identify the root-and-pattern make-up of Hebrew verbs despite the prevalence of structural opacity and irregularity in the verbs they hear, due to a high token frequency of defective (irregular)-root verbs. The study provides a detailed account of the distribution of root types and temporal categories in Hebrew CDS and CS showing how verb specific morphological features in the form of inflectional affixes in the Modal Cluster of Infinitive Imperative and Future Tense in CDS act as distributional cues facilitating verb acquisition in CS.
Morphology
The route to the derivational verb family in Hebrew: A psycholinguistic study of acquisition and development
2020 •
Orit Ashkenazi Cohen
Written Language & Literacy
Linguistic diagnostics of written texts in two school-age populations
2011 •
Ruth Berman
The paper considers the writing abilities of Hebrew-speaking grade school and middle school students from mid-high compared with low SES backgrounds, as reflected in stories and compositions they wrote on the topic of friendship. A range of linguistic means of expression were employed as diagnostic of school-age written text construction, focusing on the lexicon and including both devices applicable in different languages (overall text length in words and clauses, syntactic clause density, and lexical diversity and density as reflected in proportions of content words) as well as Hebrew-specific features (verb-pattern morphology and construct-state noun compounds). Analyses showed these features to differentiate across the independent variables of the study-age-schooling level, and SES background, and text genre (narrative vs. expository). In terms of genre, expository-type essays usually had denser and more lexically diverse texture than stories. In developmental perspective, lexica...
Frontiers in Psychology
Patterns of Adaptation in Child-Directed and Child Speech in the Emergence of Hebrew Verbs
Orit Ashkenazi Cohen
Children approach verb learning in ways that are specific to their native language, given the differential typological organization of verb morphology and lexical semantics. Parent-child interaction is the arena where children's socio-cognitive abilities enable them to track predictive relationships between tokens and extract linguistic generalizations from patterns and regularities in the ambient language. The current study examines how the system of Hebrew verbs develops as a network over time in early childhood, and the dynamic role of input-output adaptation in the network's increasing complexity. Focus is on the morphological components of Hebrew verbs in a dense corpus of two parent-child dyads in natural interaction between the ages 1;8-2;2. The 91-hour corpus contained 371,547 word tokens, 62,824 verb tokens, and 1,410 verb types (lemmas) in CDS and CS together. Network analysis was employed to explore the changing distributions and emergent systematicity of the rela...
Children's Knowledge of Verb-Structure: Data from Hebrew
1989 •
Ruth A . Berman
Journal of Child Language
The emergence of grammar: early verbs and beyond
2003 •
Ruth Berman
The paper examines the first twenty verb-forms recorded for six Hebrew-speaking children aged between 1;2 and 2;1, and how they evolve into fully inflected verbs for three of these children. Discussion focuses first on what word-forms children initially select for the verbs they produce, what role these forms play in children's emergent grammar, and how emergent grammar is reflected in the acquisition of fully inflected forms of verbs. Children's early verb repertoire indicates that they possess a strong basis for moving into the expression of a variety of semantic roles and the syntax of a range of different verb–argument structures. On the other hand, children's initial use of verbs demonstrates that they still need to acquire considerable language-particular grammatical knowledge in order to encode such relations explicitly. This language-particular knowledge demonstrates a clear pattern of acquisition, in which aspect precedes inflectional marking for gender, followe...
Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society
Surface Faithfulness Phenomena and the Consonantal Root in the Modern Hebrew Verb System
Tom Recht
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:This paper argues that from the point of view of speakers Modern Hebrew must be described as a hybrid system, possessing elements of both templatic and concatenative morphology, and that more generally, templaticity and concatenativity are not absolute, binarily opposed categories, but stand for bundles of morphological characteristics, of which a given language may possess a combination and which are subject to piecemeal diachronic change.
Usage-Based Studies in Modern Hebrew
2020 •
Ruth A . Berman
Psychology of Language and Communication
From Pre-Grammaticality to Proficiency in L1: Acquiring and Developing Infinitival Usage in Hebrew
Ruth Berman
The study traces the developmental route in acquisition and use of infinitives (e.g., lišon ‘to sleep’, le-exol ‘to-eat’, la-asot ’to-do’) in Hebrew as a first language, proceeding from the initial, “pre-grammatical“ emergence of linguistic forms among toddlers to structure-based knowledge and proficient use of the same devices in adolescence. Analysis involves a varied data-base of L1 oral Hebrew usage in: parent-child interactions of children aged 1;6 to 3;0 years; elicited storybook-based narratives of preschoolers; and personal-experience narratives and expository talks of schoolchildren, adolescents, and adults. Findings show that infinitives constitute an interesting test-case for examining the route from initial emergence via acquisition to maturely proficient command of a given subsystem in L1. Infinitival structures in Modern Hebrew, a language with an impoverished system of nonfinite verbs and lacking in auxiliaries of the kind common in Standard Average European, reveal a...
Acquiring and expressing temporality in Hebrew: A T/(M/A) Language*
2014 •
Ruth Berman
Notions involved in linguistic temporality are introduced, followed by description of the structure and function of relevant categories in Modern Hebrew, a language with impoverished grammatical Aspect and Mood. Marking of temporal distinctions is then analysed from the perspectives of language use in different discursive contexts – oral picturebook-based narratives, written fable reconstructions, personal experience accounts, and expository prose – and of language development from pre-school age across adolescence. Even young children emerge as sensitive to the major typological features of their native language, while maturely proficient speaker-writers are shown to rely on more varied rhetorical options for expressing discourse-embedded temporality.
