Henkin-Roitfarb Roni, Uziel Sigal, Ishaq Rozana
Department of Hebrew Language, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be'er Sheva, Israel.
Department of Early Childhood Education, Achva Academic College, Arugot, Israel.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2025 Mar 26;68(3S):1402-1423. doi: 10.1044/2024_JSLHR-23-00722. Epub 2024 Dec 3.
This study describes the development of verb inflectional morphology in an urban dialect of Palestinian Arabic (PA) spoken in northern Israel, specifically in the city of Haifa, and explores the effect of language typology on acquisition.
We analyzed naturalistic longitudinal speech samples from one monolingual Arabic-speaking girl aged 1;11-2;3 during spontaneous interactions with family members.
Initially, truncated forms ("bare stems") were common but disappeared by the end of the study. By age 1;11, the girl was in the proto-morphological stage, displaying clear three-member mini-paradigms. Affixation complexity gradually increased, with adjacent and obligatory suffixes acquired before distant and optional prefixes. The early acquisition of indicative prefixes (, ) preceded the later emergence of complex proclitics (e.g., volitive , progressive ), suggesting gradual, systematic morphological acquisition.
We propose three principles for the development of PA verb inflection: (a) Adjacency: Affixes adjacent to the base are acquired first. (b) R-salience: Suffixes are acquired earlier than prefixes. (c) Obligatoriness: Obligatory morphemes precede optional ones. These principles predict the girl's morphological development and reflect sensitivity to PA's richly inflecting typology. This study highlights the need for detailed descriptive research that is essential for understanding language acquisition processes and informing assessment tools, intervention programs, and educational curricula for PA-speaking children.
本研究描述了以色列北部所讲的巴勒斯坦阿拉伯语（PA）一种城市方言中动词屈折形态的发展情况，具体是在海法市，并探讨了语言类型学对习得的影响。
我们分析了一名1;11至2;3岁单语说阿拉伯语女孩在与家庭成员自发互动期间的自然主义纵向言语样本。
最初，截断形式（“光秃秃的词干”）很常见，但在研究结束时消失了。到1;11岁时，该女孩处于原形态阶段，展示出清晰的三元小型范式。词缀复杂性逐渐增加，相邻且必须的后缀在遥远且可选的前缀之前习得。指示性前缀（，）的早期习得先于复杂前附词（例如，祈使语气，进行时态）的后期出现，表明形态习得是渐进的、系统的。
我们提出了PA动词屈折发展的三个原则：（a）相邻性：与词基相邻的词缀首先习得。（b）R-显著性：后缀比前缀更早习得。（c）必要性：必须的语素先于可选的语素。这些原则预测了该女孩的形态发展，并反映了对PA丰富屈折类型的敏感性。本研究强调了详细描述性研究的必要性，这对于理解语言习得过程以及为说PA的儿童提供评估工具、干预计划和教育课程至关重要。
