What is it about?

This paper examines how a young girl, aged 1 year and 11 months to 2 years and 3 months, a native speaker of Palestinian Arabic, acquires inflectional verb forms in her language. The study analyzes natural interactions between the girl and her family members. Initially, she used simplified "bare stems" but gradually added prefixes and suffixes to create more complex verb forms. By the end of the study, she combined these elements more effectively, moving toward more advanced verb forms. Three key principles emerged in her learning: (1) she acquired affixes closest to the verb base before more distant ones (adjacency); (2) she learned suffixes before prefixes (R-salience); and (3) she mastered obligatory verb forms before optional ones (obligatoriness). These principles provide insight into how Palestinian Arabic-speaking children develop verb forms in their language, and reflect their sensitivity to the language's rich inflectional structure.

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Why is it important?

This study is important because it helps us understand how children learn language, especially Palestinian Arabic, by providing detailed observations of how they develop verb forms. These findings can be used to create better language tests, intervention programs, and educational materials for children who speak this specific Arabic dialect. Additionally, this research adds valuable data on a language that is not well-studied, facilitating global efforts to compare languages and cultures more effectively.

Perspectives

This paper represents a journey that took considerable time and effort to complete, making its eventual publication all the more satisfying. Working on the acquisition of an understudied language like Palestinian Arabic was both challenging and deeply rewarding, as it allowed me to contribute to an area of research that hasn't been widely studied to date. I hope this study opens a window into the field of psycholinguistics, making this type of research more accessible and understandable to the general public.

Sigal Uziel
Achva Academic College

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Development of Verb Inflectional Complexity in Palestinian Arabic, Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, December 2024, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA),
DOI: 10.1044/2024_jslhr-23-00722.
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