Adjective Inflection in Hebrew: A Psychollinguistic Study of Speakers of Russian, English and Arabic Compared with Native Hebrew Speakers

Alfi-Shabtay, Iris; Ravid, Dorit

doi:10.1007/978-94-007-2327-6_8

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 38 publications

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“…A different pattern emerged in a study investigating the inflectional abilities of native Russian speaking college students, who had immigrated to Israel as adolescents. This study shows lower performance of Russian-Hebrew students across both regular and irregular inflectional categories examined in the study (Alfi-Shabtay and Ravid, 2012 ), suggesting that reduced type exposure might lead to gaps in learning the morphological paradigm itself. The current study expands on these somewhat mixed findings, by further investigating the impact of the reduced exposure on vocabulary and derivational morphology in the context of Hebrew, a language with a complex morphological paradigm.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 65%

Separability of Lexical and Morphological Knowledge: Evidence from Language Minority Children

2018

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Lexical and morphological knowledge of school-aged children are correlated with each other, and are often difficult to distinguish. One reason for this might be that many tasks currently used to assess morphological knowledge require children to inflect or derive real words in the language, thus recruiting their vocabulary knowledge. The current study investigated the possible separability of lexical and morphological knowledge using two complementary approaches. First, we examined the correlations between vocabulary and four morphological tasks tapping different aspects of morphological processing and awareness, and using either real-word or pseudo-word stimuli. Thus, we tested the hypothesis that different morphological tasks recruit lexical knowledge to various degrees. Second, we compared the Hebrew vocabulary and morphological knowledge of 5th grade language minority speaking children to that of their native speaking peers. This comparison allows us to ask whether reduced exposure to the societal language might differentially influence vocabulary and morphological knowledge. The results demonstrate that indeed different morphological tasks rely on lexical knowledge to varying degrees. In addition, language minority students had significantly lower performance in vocabulary and in morphological tasks that recruited vocabulary knowledge to a greater extent. In contrast, both groups performed similarly in abstract morphological tasks with a lower vocabulary load. These results demonstrate that lexical and morphological knowledge may rely on partially separable learning mechanisms, and highlight the importance of distinguishing between these two linguistic components.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 65%

Separability of Lexical and Morphological Knowledge: Evidence from Language Minority Children

2018

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The complexity of teaching Hebrew in Israel's Arab school system

Manor,

Watad

2024

Lang. Teach.

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This paper discusses the complexities of teaching Hebrew to Israel's largest minority group, the Arabs, who must be fluent in the language if they are to succeed. While policy-making institutions in Israel today are aware of the importance of Hebrew for Arab students, the teaching of Hebrew faces serious challenges involving the status of Hebrew in Arab society, the inner-Arab state of diglossia, and the training and placement of Arab teachers of Hebrew. The distribution of the Arab population (in mixed Jewish–Arab towns, and in Arab towns and villages), as well as differing levels of exposure to Hebrew, also pose considerable challenges. The paper combines a historical-theoretical with a philosophical-theoretical approach. It analyzes findings of previous studies that examined Hebrew writings of Arabs studying to be teachers of Hebrew, and policy documents dealing with teacher training and placement in the schools. Our study found a profound gap between Arab Hebrew teachers' academic-pedagogical training and its implementation. Our main recommendations for reducing the gap are: (1) the curriculum should take Israeli Arabs' sociolinguistic situation into account; (2) the teacher placement system needs an overhaul; and (3) the teaching of Hebrew should begin in third grade.

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Acquisition of Russian gender agreement by monolingual and bilingual children

Schwartz

Minkov

Protassova

et al. 2014

International Journal of Bilingualism

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Aim and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions:The main goal of this study was to examine noun-adjective gender agreement in Russian by comparing bilingual children with diverse L2 backgrounds (English, Finnish, German, and Hebrew) with age-matched monolingual children and monolinguals one year younger. This comparison was made to investigate the influence of L2 grammar on the acquisition of gender agreement by (L1) Russian-speaking children. Design/Methodology/Approach: The participants included four groups of 4-5-year-old bilingual children with Russian as L1 and English, German, Finnish, or Hebrew as L2, who were compared to monolingual children in Russia in two age groups (3-4 and 4-5 years old). The children were matched by socioeconomic status and parents' educational background. All children were tested individually during one testing session. Agreement data were elicited using a semistructured elicitation test, with verbal and visual stimuli. Data and Analysis: We used qualitative data analysis to identify types and categories of errors, and quantitative data analysis to compare the tendencies of noun-adjective gender agreement in Russian (L1) between the groups. Findings/Conclusions: Development of gender agreement in the bilingual children from different L2 backgrounds was qualitatively similar to that of the 3-4-year-old monolingual Russian-speaking children. This result suggests that bilingual development in L1 follows the same developmental path as monolingual development, albeit with a delay. In addition, bilingual children whose L2 has grammatical gender (German, Hebrew) outperformed the other bilinguals on gender agreement, indicating that the presence of a grammatical category in both languages spoken by a bilingual facilitates category acquisition. Originality and Significance/Implications: The study contributes to the discussion on how the transparency and phonological saliency might affect the bilingual children's acquisition of inflectional morphology and on how influence of L2 on L1 might in some cases help and in other cases impede the acquisition of L1.

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Adjective Inflection in Hebrew: A Psychollinguistic Study of Speakers of Russian, English and Arabic Compared with Native Hebrew Speakers

Cited by 3 publications

References 38 publications

Separability of Lexical and Morphological Knowledge: Evidence from Language Minority Children

Separability of Lexical and Morphological Knowledge: Evidence from Language Minority Children

The complexity of teaching Hebrew in Israel's Arab school system

Acquisition of Russian gender agreement by monolingual and bilingual children

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