Suchergebnisse

The focus of the present study was the trajectory of the acquisition of noun pluralization in Hebrew as a window into the development of inflectional morphology among early sequential Russian-Hebrew speaking bilinguals. Our participants were six early sequential bilingual children between 36 and 42 months of age at the beginning of the study, who acquired Russian (L1) at home and at preschool within a 'first language first approach' and whose age at the onset of their acquisition of Hebrew (L2) was about 3 years. We investigated both qualitative and quantitative features of noun pluralization in Hebrew (L2) acquisition in order to determine (1) whether early sequential bilingual children are delayed or accelerated in this domain; (2) whether they show similar or different patterns of errors in comparison to the L1 children; and (3) at what age sequential bilingual children acquire regular versus irregular noun plural forms
compared with the L1 children.

We relied on a multi-faceted longitudinal analysis of noun pluralization, examining both correct and incorrect production- in structured elicitations as well as in (semi-) spontaneous interactions. Comparing our data to those collected for Hebrew L1 speakers, the results for monolinguals and early sequential bilinguals show a striking similarity with respect to the development of pluralization. These findings suggest that the accelerated rate of ESBs' L2 pluralization mechanism provides evidence of the linguistic maturation hypothesis.

This volume dedicated to Dorit Ravid, offers 29 new chapters on the multiple facets of spoken and written language learning and usage from a group of illustrious scholars and scientists, focusing on typologically different languages and anchored in a variety of communicative settings. The book encompasses five interrelated yet distinct topics. One set of studies is in the field of developmental psycholinguistics, covering the acquisition of lexical and grammatical categories from toddlerhood to adolescence. A second topic involves a section of studies on the interface of cognition and language, with chapters on processing, production, comprehension, teaching and learning language in usage and in historical perspective. A third topic involves a theoretical and applied perspectives on the acquisition and development of literacy competence, including reading, writing, spelling and text production. A fourth topic brings together an array of studies on social, environmental and clinical diversity in language, highlighting novel issues in multilingualism, immigration, language and literacy disorders. Finally, a section of the volume examines in depth questions in Modern Hebrew linguistics, as the home language and launching base of Dorit Ravids research work.