Morphological knowledge without morphological structure

Abstract

During the one-word stage, Hebrew-speaking children have only one form for each verb paradigm, and this is usually the free stem. Crucially, the children tend not to produce verbs with inflectional suffixes, although their prosodic phonology allows them to do so. We argue that this phenomenon reflects the childrens capacity to distinguish between stems and suffixes (by identifying the stem) before they start producing the morphological paradigm. That is, some morphological knowledge appears before this knowledge has a direct surface manifestation in the childrens speech.

From Pre-Grammaticality to Proficiency in L1: Acquiring and Developing Infinitival Usage in Hebrew

“…Table 6. "Bare stem" forms observed in early "pre-grammatical" child usage of verbs in three different binyan patterns, interpretable in isolation as Infinitives or as inflected forms As discussed from various points of view in the research on early verb use in Hebrew, such forms are a robust phenomenon, constituting the bulk of children's initial verb forms between ages of around 1;6 to 2;0 (e.g., Adam & Bat-El, 2008;Berman & Armon-Lotem, 1997;Lustigman, 2012). As indicated in the examples in (2), these are typically "opaque", since they lack a clear target form and need to be interpreted by adults in relation to their use in a particular linguistic or extra-linguistic context (Lustigman, 2015).…”

Optional opacity: A syntactically-based analysis of early Hebrew verb morphology

“…Table 1 illustrates these inflectional categories for verbs formed with the consonants g-d-l in three high-frequency binyan patterns: P1 qal (for a verb meaning Intransitive 'grow'), P3 pi'el (Transitive 'raise'), P5 hif'il (Causative 'make-bigger, enlarge'). 1 at RYERSON UNIV on June 4, 2016 fla.sagepub.com Downloaded from A range of studies on acquisition of Hebrew verb inflection have dealt with different facets of the domain, including: children's initial verb forms (Berman, 1978a;Berman & Armon-Lotem, 1996), with special attention to children's pervasive reliance on unaffixed 'bare stems' (Adam & Bat-El, 2008;Armon-Lotem & Berman, 2003;Lustigman, 2012); the order and distribution of different inflectional categories (Armon-Lotem, 1996;Berman & Dromi, 1984;Dromi, Leonard, Adam, & Zaduneisky-Erlich, 1999;Lustigman, 2013); and individual differences in the course of acquisition (Bat-El, 2012;Ravid, 1997). The present analysis departs from prior research on Hebrew verb inflection by addressing the issue contextually, in terms of the syntactic environment in which verbs occur.…”

“…As noted by Adam and Bat-El (2008), the pervasive use of bare verb forms is morphologically motivated rather than arising from purely phonological constraints in the sense that such forms cannot be attributed to omission of unstressed inflectional affixes, since (1) stressed suffixes are also absent from their speech (e.g., Child: gagel '[g-l-g-l, P3 = roll]' Adult: hi hitgalgelá? 'she rolled+Sg.Fm.?'…”

Developing structural specification: Productivity in early Hebrew verb usage

“…The 'bare-stem' phenomenon cannot be attributed to phonological constraints, since in this same developmental period, children produce many di-and even trisyllabic forms that correspond quite clearly to the relevant target words (e.g., táktorim for the plural noun tráktorim 'tractors' [Shachar,1;7.17];  ugiya 'cookie' [Lior, 1;9.01]; alala for  agala 'buggy' [Smadar, 1;6.14];  ozaim for the plural noun xaruzim 'beads' [Naama,1;7.27]). Moreover, all four children used such forms even in cases where the immediately preceding adult input included an inflected form of the same verb, as in (2). (2) Children's use of 'bare stems' after inflected input: Since occurrence of bare stems cannot be due to phonological production constraints per se, these omissions are in essence 'morphological'; that is, bare stems represent the current state of children's morphological knowledge, both inflectional and derivational (Adam & Bat-El, 2008).…”