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Factors affecting the acquisition of plural morphology in Jordanian Arabic*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2014

ABDULKAFI ALBIRINI
ABDULKAFI ALBIRINI*
Affiliation:
Utah State University
*
Address for correspondence: Utah State University (Languages, Philosophy and Communication Studies, 0720 Old Main, Logan, Utah 84321, United States. e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This study investigates the development of plural morphology in Jordanian Arab children, and explores the role of the predictability, transparency, productivity, and frequency of different plural forms in determining the trajectory that children follow in acquiring this complex inflectional system. The study also re-examines the development of the notion of default over several years. Sixty Jordanian children, equally divided among six age groups (three to eight years), completed an oral real-word pluralization task and a nonsense-word pluralization task. The findings indicate that feminine sound plurals are acquired before and extended to the other plural forms. Productivity and frequency seem to shape the acquisition patterns among younger children, but predictability becomes more critical at a later age. Younger children use the most productive plural as the default form, but older children tend to use two default forms based on frequency distributions in the adult language. The theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , July 2015 , pp. 734 - 762
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

[*]

This study has benefited greatly from the work of Elabbas Benmamoun and his associates on plural morphology (see ‘References’) and from Benmamoun's invaluable feedback on this research. Special thanks go to the participants in the study and to the school staff who facilitated the collection of the data. I would like to acknowledge the statistical help of Xin Dai. I am grateful to the JCL editors and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. All errors are, of course, mine.

References

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