We compare learning of two inflection types--obligatory noun plurals and optional noun possessives. We tested 107 Hebrew-speaking children aged 6-7 on the same tasks at the beginning and end of first grade. Performance on both constructions improved during this short period, but plurals scored higher from the start, with improvement only in…

The study examines prosodic characteristics of Hebrew speech directed to children between 0 ; 9-3 ; 0 years, based on longitudinal samples of 228,946 tokens (8,075 types). The distribution of prosodic patterns--the number of syllables and stress patterns--is analyzed across three lexical categories, distinguishing not only between open- and…

The acquisition of German plurals has been the focus of controversy in the last decade. In this paper we claim that degree of productivity (i.e. the capacity of nouns to form potential plurals) plays a key role in determining pace of acquisition. A plural elicitation task was administered to 84 Viennese German-speaking children aged 2;6 to 6;0.…

This study investigates the role of phonological and morphological information in children's developing orthographies in two languages with different linguistic typologies: Hebrew, a Semitic language with a highly synthetic morphology, and Dutch, a Germanic language with a sparse morphology. 192 Israeli and 192 Belgian monolingual schoolchildren…

The paper examines the nominal lexicon in later language acquisition as a window on linguistic knowledge and usage across childhood and adolescence. The paper presents a psycholinguistically motivated and cognitively grounded analysis of the distribution of ten semantic noun categories (the Noun Scale) across development, modality, and genre.…

Examined the distribution of two Hebrew nominal structures in spoken and written texts of two genres produced by 90 native-speaking participants. Written texts were found to be denser than spoken texts lexically and syntactically as measured by a number of novel N-N compounds and denominal adjectives per clause; in older age groups this difference…

Analyzed the development of two morphological structures in Hebrew, one inflectional and the other derivational, and examined the mutual contribution of morphological knowledge and learning the written code. In a longitudinal design, 40 children were tested twice on two oral tasks--inflecting nouns for possession and deriving denominal…

Examined how Hebrew-speaking children acquired Hebrew-derived nominals (HDNs) of two types (action nominals and deverbal nouns). Child and adult native Hebrew speakers were tested on comprehension and production of HDNs. Acquisition of HDNs began at age 8 and was not complete by age 15. Task type, binyan patterns, and morphological regularity all…