Hebrew Adjectives in Later Language Text Production

Abstract

The study investigates the distribution and use of adjectives in 252 texts produced by 63 Hebrew-speaking children, adolescents, and adults who were asked to tell and write a story about a personal fight or a quarrel, and to present a talk and write an expository text on the topic of school violence. All adjective types and tokens in each text were identified, counted, classified, and analyzed using semantic, morphological, and syntactic criteria. Findings show that the adjective class grows larger, richer, and more diverse with age and schooling -in lexicon, morpho-semantics, and syntax. Also, adjectives configure by text genres and modalities in ways that provide independent support for text type classification from spoken narratives, on the one hand, to written expositories, on the other. Finally, gender effects point in the direction of Hebrew-speaking girls and women employing a richer and more diverse adjective lexicon than boys and men in this study.

Spoken and written narration in Hebrew

“…When compared with spoken texts, Hebrew written texts were found to be informationally denser, lexically richer and more diverse, as well as containing more high-register lexical items and morphological constructions (Berman & Nir 2011;, fewer repetitions, false starts, hedges, and other disfluencies (Ravid & Berman 2006). Written texts also contained more abstract and morphologically complex nominals (Ravid 2006;Ravid & Cahana-Amitay 2005), often modified by derived adjectives in the attributive position (Ravid & Levie 2010), as well as longer and more complex noun phrases (Ravid & Berman 2010), often in the form of heavy compounds (Ravid & Zilberbuch 2003).…”

Infrequent word classes in the speech of two- to seven-year-old children with cochlear implants and their normally hearing peers: A longitudinal study of adjective use

“…Naturalistic studies of spontaneous speech show that adjectives account for only about 5% of word tokens in child-directed speech [27,35]. Therefore, it is not surprising that adjective production was shown to be a good indicator of language proficiency [36] and language impairments [37][38][39].…”

Linguistics in the service of communication disorders

“…Evidence points to skilled writers being able to construct coherent texts with longer and denser information packages in hierarchically complex syntactic constructions (Ravid in press; Ravid & Berman, 2010) which can be re-read, reviewed and revised by readers within their context without the pressures of on-line processing (Berman & Ravid, 2008;Ravid & Tolchinsky, 2002). This enables researchers to investigate the elusive concept of "syntactic complexity" in the context or writing.…”

“…They also find the production and comprehension of extended discourse challenging (Swisher et al, 1995). Once at school, they have difficulty in acquiring command of linguistic literacy, that is, written language skills related to thinking about language (Ravid & Tolchinsky 2002), of writing and reading, of written text comprehension and text production (Scott & Windsor 2000). Side by side as being a central, typical language disorders syndrome, language impairment has been at the center of a linguistic debate for several decades regarding language representation in the mind and in the brain (Leonard & Deevy 2006).…”