Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T14:10:48.919Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Marking of verb transitivity by Hebrew-speaking children*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Ruth A. Berman
Ruth A. Berman*
Affiliation:
Tel Aviv University
*
Address for correspondence: Department of Linguistics, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Israel, 69978.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The study examines children's command of transitivity permutations in Hebrew, where a change in verb-argument syntax entails a change in verb-morphology. 30 children aged two, three and eight were required to produce existing and novel Hebrew verbs differing in transitivity. Younger children showed a good grasp of the syntax and semantics, but not the morphological marking of transitivity, three-year-olds did much better, and eight-year-olds produced mainly adultlike responses. Results were higher on existing verbs than on novel forms. Direction of change had little effect with existing verbs, but with novel verbs success was much higher in changing intransitive to transitive forms than the converse. Some alternations proved easier than others, e.g. intransitive activity verbs in the basic pa'al verb-pattern yielded more causative hif'il forms than intransitive inchoative verbs in the nif'al pattern. Findings throw light on the development of derivational morphology, item-based versus class-based learning, and the impact of lexical productivity and language-particular properties on acquisition.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , October 1993 , pp. 641 - 669
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

The study was supported by grant No. 87-00015/1 from the United States—Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF). Transcription of longitudinal data was aided by funding from the Child Language Data Exchange System, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh. I am grateful to Eve Clark for her suggestions and to two anonymous journal reviewers and the journal editor for their careful and constructive comments on earlier versions. Thanks are due to Orly Guata for carrying out the pilot study, to Eia Brosh and Tsipora Segal for help in designing and conducting fieldwork, and to Yael Kfir for her contribution to data-collection and analysis.

References

REFERENCES

Berko, J. (1958). The child's learning of English morphology. Word 14, 150–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berman, R. A. (1980). Child language as evidence for grammatical description: preschool construals of transitivity in the Hebrew verb system. Linguistics 18, 677–701.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berman, R. A. (1981). Children's regularization of plural forms. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 20, 34–44.Google Scholar
Berman, R. A. (1982). Verb-pattern alternation: the interface of morphology, syntax, and semantics in Hebrew child language. Journal of Child Language 9, 169–91.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Berman, R. A. (1985). Acquisition of Hebrew. In Slobin, D. I. (ed.), Crosslinguistic study of language acquisition, Vol. I. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Berman, R. A. (1986). The acquisition of morphology/syntax: a crosslinguistic perspective. In Fletcher, P. & Garman, M. (eds), Language acquisition: studies in first language development (2nd edition). Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Berman, R. A. (1987). Productivity in the lexicon: new-noun formation in Modern Hebrew. Folia Linguistica 21, 425–61.Google Scholar
Berman, R. A. (1989). Children's knowledge of verb structure: data from Hebrew. Paper given at Boston University Conference on Language Development.Google Scholar
Berman, R. A. (1990). On acquiring an (S)VO language: subjectless sentences in children's Hebrew. Linguistics 28, 1135–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berman, R. A. (in press). Developmental perspectives on transitivity: a confluence of cues. In Levy, Y. (ed.) Other children, other languages: issues in the theory of language acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Berman, R. A. & Clark, E. V. (1993). What children know about coining verbs in English and Hebrew. Paper given at Sixth International Congress for the Study of Child Language, Trieste, Italy.Google Scholar
Berman, R. A. & Sagi, Y. (1981). Word-formation and lexical innovations of young children. Hebrew Linguistics 18, 31–62 [in Hebrew].Google Scholar
Berman, R. A. & Weissenborn, J. (1991). Acquisition of word-order: a crosslinguistic study. Final Scientific Report, the German–Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development [G.I.F.], Jerusalem, 05, 1991.Google Scholar
Bowerman, M. (1974). Learning the structure of causative verbs: a study in relationship of cognitive, semantic, and syntactic development. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 8, 142–78.Google Scholar
Bowerman, M. (1982). Evaluating competing linguistic models with language acquisition data: implications of developmental errors with causative verbs. Quaderni di Semantica 3, 5–65.Google Scholar
Braine, M. D. S., Brody, R. E., Fisch, M. S. & Weisberger, M. J. (1990). Can children use a verb without exposure to its argument structure? Journal of Child Language 17, 313–42.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bybee, J. & Slobin, D. I. (1982). Rules and schemes in the development and use of the English past tense. Language 58, 265–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, E. V. & Berman, R. A. (1984). Structure and use in the acquisition of word-formation. Language 60, 542–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, E. V. & Berman, R. A. (1987). Types of linguistic knowledge: interpreting and producing compound nouns. Journal of Child Language 14, 547–68.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Frankel, D. G. & Arbel, T. (1982). Probabilistic assignments of sentence relations on the basis of differentially weighted interpretive cues. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 11, 447–64.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gordon, P. & Chafetz, J. (1990). Verb-based versus class-based accounts of actionality effects in children's comprehension of passives. Cognition 36, 227–54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Guata, O. (1989). Children's ability to use verb-roots in different binyan patterns in the expression of transitivity. Tel-Aviv University seminar paper [in Hebrew].Google Scholar
Guri-Herling, N. (1988). The role of word order, accusativity marking, and grammatical agreement in determining semantic relations. Tel-Aviv University seminar paper [in Hebrew].Google Scholar
Hecht, B. (1985). Situations and language: children's use of plural allomorphs in familiar and unfamiliar settings. Stanford University doctoral dissertation.Google Scholar
Hochberg, J. (1986). Children's judgements of transitivity errors. Journal of Child Language 13, 317–34.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Junger, J. (1987). Predicate formation in the verbal system of Modern Hebrew. Dordrecht: Foris.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaplan, D. (1983). Order of acquisition of morpho-syntactic elements by Hebrew-speaking children aged 2–3 years. Tel Aviv University master's thesis [in Hebrew].Google Scholar
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1986). Stage/structure versus phase/process in modelling linguistic and cognitive development. In Levin, I. (ed.), Stage and Structure: reopening the debate. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 164–90.Google Scholar
Levy, Y. (1987). The wug technique revisited. Cognitive Development 2, 71–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lord, C. (1979). Don't you fall me down: children's generalizations regarding cause and transitivity. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 17, 81–9.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (1978). Processing a first language: the acquisition of morphophonology. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 43, No. 174.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maratsos, M. P., Gudeman, R., Gerard-Ngo, P. & DeHart, G. (1987). A study in novel word learning: the productivity of the causative. In MacWhinney, B. (ed.), Mechanisms of language acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Pinker, S., Lebeaux, D. S. & Frost, L. A. (1987). Productivity and constraints in the acquisition of the passive. Cognition 26, 195–267.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rabinowitch, S. (1985). Proficiency in Hebrew of English–Hebrew bilinguals compared with their monolingual Hebrew-speaking peers. Tel-Aviv University unpublished doctoral dissertation [in Hebrew].Google Scholar
Ravid, D. (1990). Internal structure constraints on new-word formation devices in Modern Hebrew. Folia Linguistica 24, 289–347.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (1990). Factors of language typology in the crosslinguistic study of acquisition. Berkeley Cognitive Science Report No. 66.Google Scholar
Sokolov, J. (1988). Cue validity in Hebrew sentence comprehension. Journal of Child Language 15, 129–56.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed