This case study aims to compare narratives written in digital media by Arabic native speaking teenagers in Israel. The data was collected from two schools in Kufr Qari’ village in the Triangle region. Of these students, 35 were boys (45%) and 43 were girls (55%). The teenagers are of different ages (13, 15, 17 years old) who wrote stories in their preferred writing system (WS) used in digital media (Arabic, Arabic written with Roman alphabets, or Arabic written in Hebrew letters). Focusing on the macrostructure as well as the microstructure, we investigate differences in narratives among the different age groups across several skills as well as differences across the varied writing systems. In analyzing the narrative texts, we applied several statistical models. All macro and micro element evaluations were compared across ages and language choices within a Generalized Linear Model (GLM) framework. The results show significance by age for the Macrostructures of goal and meta ending as they require deeper thinking skills. Moreover, WS affected the macro- and microstructure of the narrative. Producing a narrative in Arabic script burdened the teens due to the diglossic nature of the language and orthographic complexities. In Arabic script, the use of MSA nouns and verbs added to the quality of the macrostructure. In addition, girls tended to choose Arabic, whereas boys were more likely to choose Hebrew script. This may be ascribed to social factors. Finally, girls regularly generated more micro elements in parallel to the boys’ micro-element production.

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IntroductionArabic, a Semitic language, displays a particularly rich derivational morphological system with all verb stems consisting of a semantic root and a prosodic verb-pattern. Such regular and frequently encountered knowledge is expected to be acquired early. The present study presents a developmental perspective on the relative contribution of morphological and semantic complexity to the acquisition of verbs in Spoken Arabic.MethodVerbs in a spontaneous corpus from 133 typically developing children, 2; 6–6; 0-year-old, were coded for type and token frequency of verbal patterns and root type, and classified according to semantic complexity.ResultsResults support an item-based emergence driven by semantic complexity at the earliest stages of acquisition. A developmental expansion in the diversity of verbal patterns and morphological complexity was observed with age. Morphological complexity is only identified when the same root appears in different verb patterns.DiscussionThe late emergence of the same root in different verb patterns indicates that the perception of verb patterns as abstract linguistic entities beyond the actual verbs is attained later than the semantically-constrained verbs in earlier childhood. We conclude that whereas semantic complexity obstructs verbs from emerging in the lexicon in younger age groups, morphological complexity constitutes no such obstruction, since their perception as morphological devices is attained later in acquisition.