Chapter 14 Rudiments of Inflectional Morphology Skills in ... · PDF filechildren has shown that morphemic awareness and the ability to segment and ... model, according to which

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Abstract The present study investigated the development of inflectional morpho-logical skills in primary school children learning Hebrew as a foreign language. Participants were grade 1 and 2 children whose home language is English, attend-ing a bilingual English-Hebrew day school in Canada. Side by side with a growing repertoire of Hebrew vocabulary, grammatical skills and sentence comprehension, rudiments of various inflectional skills are already part of the linguistic skills of primary school children who have had one to two years of exposure to Hebrew in the classroom. Hebrew as L2 children who had better syntactic skills were more successful on more analytic morphological inflection tasks as well. Familiarity with specific lexical items was more important for the successful inflections of specific words than general vocabulary knowledge. On the whole, just like monolingual children, Hebrew as L2 children who have better developed vocabulary and mor-phological skills are better able to comprehend sentences, and vice versa.

Morphological Awareness, Vocabulary, and Literacy Skills

Morphology provides one of the organizing principles of the mental lexicon (Aitchinson, 2003). Processes of morphological analysis underlie lexical expansion in school children, and a substantial proportion of the words children know are acquired through morphological form-to-meaning mappings (Anglin, 1993). The use of word parts, including morphological awareness (MA), to identify and retain meanings is an area that has been receiving increasing attention among researchers and educators. Morphological awareness entails the ability to reflect on and manip-ulate morphemes, the smallest meaningful units in words. It involves the ability to reflect on complex words in a way that may assist with the derivation of their meaning. According to Carlisle (2003) “… morphological learning is such that phonologic

E. Geva (*) University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected]

Chapter 14Rudiments of Inflectional Morphology Skills in Emergent English–Hebrew Biliterates

Esther Geva and Dana Shafman

D. Aram and O. Korat (eds.), Literacy Development and Enhancement Across Orthographies and Cultures, Literacy Studies 101,DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-0834-6_5, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010

192 E. Geva and D. Shafman

and orthographic representations of morphemes in written language cannot be understood as a function of phonological awareness alone without regard for morphology or for morphological awareness alone without regard for phonology” (p. 307). MA is a complex construct that involves phonological, semantic, syntactic, and orthographic knowledge (Ravid & Malenky, 2001).

MA and Literacy Skills

The role of lexical and morphological knowledge in enhancing literacy development has been established in studies involving typically developing and language-impaired children (Carlisle, 2000), and difficulties in identifying morphological relationships are related to poor reading comprehension (Mahony, Singson, & Mann, 2000).

Research involving monolingual English as a first language (L1) and Hebrew as L1 children has shown that morphemic awareness and the ability to segment and manipu-late morphemes within complex words continue to develop through their school years. In Hebrew and English alike, this ability makes independent contributions to reading and spelling over and above phonemic awareness and decoding skills (Aram, 2005; Fowler & Liberman, 1995; Levin, Ravid, & Rapaport, 1999; Ravid, 2001; Singson, Mahony, & Mann, 2000). Performance on MA tasks tends to correlate with various linguistic and reading tasks, including phonemic awareness (Muter, Hulme, Snowling, & Stevenson, 2004; Singson, Mahony, & Mann, 2000), pseudoword decoding (Deacon & Kirby, 2004; Nagy, et al., 2006; Singson, et al., 2000), various measures of vocabu-lary knowledge (Carlisle, 2000; Deacon & Kirby, 2004; Ku & Anderson, 2003; Nagy, Berninger & Abbot, 2006; Singson et al., 2000), word reading tasks (Deacon & Kirby, 2004; Muter et al., 2004; Singson, et al., 2000), reading of morphologically complex words (Carlisle, 2000; Saiegh-Haddad & Geva, 2007), and reading comprehension (Carlisle, 2000; Deacon & Kirby, 2004; Ku & Anderson, 2003; Muter et al., 2004). Ku and Anderson (2003), who reviewed the literature, conclude that, across several languages, children develop inflectional morphology skills in their home or first language (L1) before skills involving derivational and compound morphology, with the latter two continuing to develop throughout the elementary school years.

Morphological Processes

Alphabetic orthographies preserve morphological relatedness in the spellings of words (Verhoven & Perfetti, 2003), but they vary in morphological transparency, or the degree to which the sound and the meaning of a complex word can be recovered from its internal morphological structure (Elbro & Arnbak, 1996). Concatenative languages, like English, utilize linear morphological processes (prefixing or suffixing) to generate new words from free stems (McCarthy, 1981). In English, complex words typically retain the unique phonological and orthographic identity of the stem, thus preserving morphological transparency (e.g., consider care–carelessness). English stems may undergo phonological and/or orthographic shifts (e.g., complete–completion).

19314 Rudiments of Inflectional Morphology Skills

Word derivation in non-concatenative languages, like Hebrew, is non-linear and complex (Ravid & Malenky, 2001). Word formation involves the simultaneous affix-ation of two linguistic units: a consonantal root (e.g., L-M-D) that signals the core meaning or the semantic family of the word, and a word-pattern (“mishkal”), which is a fixed and primarily vocalic template or pattern that instantiates the root as a unique lexical item. Both the root and the word-pattern are bound morphemes that cannot stand on their own as independent words. The concurrent affixation of the consonantal root within fixed slots in the word-pattern often leads to discontinued phonological and/or orthographic representations of the root. For instance, applying the consonantal root L-M-D onto the word pattern CiCuC (where C represents the slots intended for the insertion of the root consonants) results in a disrupted representation of the root L-M-D in the word limud (studying), and the vocalic pattern CaCCan, yields lamdan (scholar). This example illustrates the resultant morphological opacity in Hebrew.

The Development of Hebrew Morphological Skills in Monolingual Hebrew Speakers

Hebrew can be characterized as a synthetic language that is rich in morphological structures. Ravid (1995) and Shimron (2006) stress the complexity of Modern Hebrew and emphasize that experience with and exposure to oral Hebrew is essen-tial in order for MA to develop. Recent research evidence suggests that from a young age children whose home language (L1) is Hebrew are influenced by their language typology and use its characteristics, including information about the root, as a core morphological entity when they read and spell in Hebrew (e.g., Ben-Dror, Bentin, & Frost, 1995; Gillis & Ravid, 2006; Ravid & Bar-On, 2005).

MA is directly related to children’s reading and writing skills in Hebrew (Levin, et al., 1999; Ravid & Schiff, 2004). Of particular relevance to the current chapter is Ravid’s (2001) summary suggesting that in the development of morphology, Hebrew as L1 speaking children first mark inflections (such as gender and number) around the age of 2 years, and that derivations appear between the ages of 3 and 6 years. Further mastery in Hebrew morphology however begins with formal reading and writing instruction (Ravid, 1995).

The complex relations between oral language, writing, and morphological skills were explored by Levin et al. (1999). Their findings suggest a “bootstrapping” model, according to which writing skills enhance oral morphology skills and vice versa. They explain that becoming aware of common spelling features of semanti-cally related words contributes to an awareness of the morphemic connection between these words. Awareness of the orthographic code provides children with clues to the morphological infrastructure of Hebrew. Given the complexity of Hebrew morphology it is perhaps not surprising that difficulties with morphological skills are especially detrimental to Hebrew readers (Ben-Dror et al, 1995). Likewise, Ravid, Levie, and Ben-Zvi (2003) report that Hebrew-speaking children who are weak readers have poorer MA skills than their stronger reading peers.


MA: L1 and L2 Relations

It is reasonable to assume that conclusions based on research with monolingual children are also relevant to children who develop their vocabulary skills in a second language (L2). Recently, researchers have begun to examine MA in bilingual learn-ers, including English–French learners (e.g., Deacon, Wade-Woolley, & Kirby, 2006), Chinese-English (Wang, Chen, & Chen, 2006), English–Arabic (Saiegh-Haddad & Geva), Russian–Hebrew (Schwartz, Geva, Share, & Leikin, 2007), Hebrew–English (Kahn-Horwitz, Shimron, & Sparks, 2005; Schiff, & Calif, 2007), and English–Hebrew (Bindman, 2004). Deacon et al. (2006) conclude that MA can be applied cross-linguistically. However, the results of Bindman’s (2004) cross-lin-guistic study suggest that the nature of the L1–L2 relationships may depend on children’s proficiency in the L2. Saiegh-Haddad and Geva (2007) report that while there were significant correlations between English and Arabic phonological aware-ness the relationships between morphological skills in L1 and L2 may not be univer-sal. Relatedly, Schiff and Calif (2007) who studied Hebrew–English bilinguals also conclude that the extent of L1–L2 morphological relations may depend on the “lan-guage proximity” of the particular language features under study. The differences among studies may be related to methodology, the age of the participants, typologi-cal differences, and the extent to which children had an opportunity to develop lan-guage proficiency and literacy skills in their respective languages. Unlike phonological awareness, specific aspects of MA may be more sensitive to language-specific skills. In addition, the extent and nature of the relationships among complex L1 and L2 language skills may be mitigated by L1 and L2 language proficiency to varying degrees, and below a certain language proficiency threshold it may not be possible to note cross-linguistic relationships (Saiegh-Haddad & Geva, 2007).

Whether the development of morphological skills in children learning Hebrew as a foreign language (HFL) follows the same route as native Hebrew speaking children is an important question both theoretically and practically. It is reasonable to expect that Hebrew morphological skills would be slower to develop in HFL children, and that MA development would be dependent on contextual factors such as exposure, and intra-individual cognitive-linguistic skills. It is also reasonable to expect that the Hebrew oral and spoken language components are interrelated as they are in children whose L1 is Hebrew. From a young age native speakers of Hebrew are influenced by the morphological features of their language and use its characteristics when acquiring reading and spelling skills. This development depends on other linguistic achievements, including phonological awareness, vocabulary learning, and learning to read and spell. In turn, morphological awareness can facilitate higher levels of reading and writing in Hebrew. What about HFL learners who begin to acquire their Hebrew language and literacy skills concurrently at school, in the absence of the same level of exposure that native speakers receive at home and in their community since infancy? In this chapter we begin to explore early steps in the emergence of morphological skills in HFL children, and the extent to which these skills are boot-strapped to other linguistic skills. The present study sought to investigate the devel-opment of inflectional morphological skills in primary school children learning


Hebrew as a foreign language. Two aspects were of interest: (1) whether different parts of inflectional morphology skills developed sequentially or in parallel, and (2) the extent to which these skills depended on vocabulary and syntactic skills, or whether rudiments of inflectional morphological skills could be observed regardless of Hebrew vocabulary and syntactic knowledge. In particular, we wanted to examine the role of vocabulary and syntactic skills in understanding individual differences in inflectional morphological awareness of beginning HFL learners.

Method

Participants

Participants were drawn from a private Hebrew day school in Toronto, Canada. A total of 50 children in Grades 1 (N = 19) and 2 (N = 31) participated. The Grade 1 children were drawn from two classes (N = 8 and 11, respectively) totaling 9 males and 10 females, with a mean age of 83.11 months (SD = 2.51). The Grade 2 children were drawn from three classes (N = 14, 7, and 10, respectively) totaling 15 males and 16 females with a mean age of 94.23 months (SD = 3.36).

All participants spoke English as their first and home language, and were learning Hebrew as L2 in a bilingual day-school program, in which the required English curriculum is taught for half of a day, and the other half is devoted to the Hebrew language, literacy, and cultural components. Children were exposed to approximately 2½ h of Hebrew per day, 5 days a week (total 12–13 h per week). Most of the exposure to Hebrew took place within and surrounding working with Hebrew text. None of the children used Hebrew as a means of communication at home.

Procedure

The data presented here are part of a larger, longitudinal study, currently in progress, and are part of the Time 1 findings. Measures were administered one-on-one in the spring. All instructions for the Hebrew measures were given in English to ensure the child understood what was required. Further, no measure was administered unless it was clear that the child understood the task at hand. Only those with returned parental consent were tested (62% of the Grade 1 students and 47% of the Grade 2 students).

Measures

Nonverbal Ability

Nonverbal ability was measured using the Matrix Analogies Test-Expanded Form (MAT; Naglieri, 1985). This is a standardized measure that requires the child to point to the missing piece of a design from a group of possible fillers.


Inflectional Morphology

Real-word inflections. This task was based on Shatil (1997), and included 14 real, high-frequency Hebrew word pairs. For example, the child would hear: etz, etzim (tree, trees), and would be asked in English “which word says there are many? etz or etzim?”

Nonword inflections. This task was adapted from Shatil (1997). It included 14 nonword Hebrew pairs that follow Hebrew inflectional conventions. For example, the child would hear: kaxesh, kaxsha – and then asked “Which word is for a girl? kaxesh or kaxsha” (correct answer: kaxsha).

Analogies. An experimental, 18-item, expressive word analogy task, developed by the authors, measured the child’s ability to produce the inflected version of a word, in a manner analogous to a pair presented first. Puppets were used to clarify the task and make it more interesting. For example: (1) adom – adomim; [red(singular) – red (plural)]; yarok -??? [green (singular)]; expected response – yerukim [green (plural)]. (2) rakdanit-rakdan [dancer, (feminine, singular) – dancer (masculine, singular)] paxdanit -??? [someone who is scared (feminine, singular)] – expected response: paxdan [someone who is scared (masculine, singular)]. Analogy items assessed a range of inflectional aspects such as singular–plural nouns, masculine–feminine adjectival inflections, and simple tenses.

Hebrew Language Proficiency

Receptive language. A Hebrew adaptation of the standardized Test for Reception of Grammar (TROG) developed by Geva, Wade-Woolley, and Shany (1997) measured comprehension of grammatical contrasts. In this 20-item task, the child hears a sentence, for example, hatzvi ratz (the deer is running) and is asked to point to one of four pictures that best corresponds to the sentence heard.

Oral comprehension. A Hebrew oral cloze task developed by Geva and Siegel (2000) measured sentence comprehension, by filling in the missing word in each sentence, e.g., be’xanukah madleekim…? (On xanukah we light…?), with the appropriate answer being either nerot (candles) or xanukiah (menorah). There were a total of 20 items and all were administered.

Receptive vocabulary. A standardized Hebrew adaptation of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test – Third Edition (Solberg & Nevo, 1979) was used. The child hears a word and then chooses one of four pictures that best corresponds to the word. As the test was designed for native speakers of Hebrew, only the first 39 items were administered to all children.

Morphological vocabulary was a receptive vocabulary choice task that measured children’s familiarity with the 14 Hebrew base words in the Real-word inflections task described above. For example, “Does etz mean tree or flower?” Five of the same vocabulary items appeared in the analogies task as well.


Results

The Development of Morphological Skills

Descriptive statistics of the language and morphological tasks are presented sepa-rately for Grades 1 and 2, in Table 14.1. The means are slightly higher in Grade 2 showing that there were some gains between Grade 1 and Grade 2 on all aspects of Hebrew as L2 development. A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was run to determine an overall grade effect. The Wilk’s of .69 only approached signifi-cance, F(9, 40) = 2.03, p = .06. Univariate analysis revealed that there was a signifi-cant grade effect on the Analogies task, F(1, 48) = 9.573, p < .01. A MANCOVA covarying age in months was not significant either (Wilk’s of .74; F(9, 39) = 1.56, p = .16). Relatedly, the significant univariate grade effect held up for the Analogies task, F(2, 47) = 4.69, p < .01. Regardless of age and grade, there were no signifi-cant differences on the other measures, even though consistently, Grade 2 means were somewhat higher than the respective Grade 1 means.

Correlates of Morphological Skills

Merging data Correlations among variables, controlling for age, were calculated within each grade. Identical patterns of significant relationships among the vari-ables were displayed, and all variables were significantly intercorrelated (p < .05). The only exception, in both grade levels, was the non-significant correlation

Table 14.1 Descriptive statistics for all measures in Grades 1 (N = 19) and 2 (N = 31)

Measure Items Grade Mean SD t

Receptive language 20 1 14.21 3.14 .062 14.16 2.63

Oral comprehension 20 1 3.68 3.61 .972 4.71 3.66

Receptive vocabulary 39 1 19.26 6.49 1.162 21.39 6.14

Morphological vocabulary

14 1 12.84 2.29 1.792 13.81 1.52

Real-word inflections 14 1 10.79 1.72 1.092 11.39 1.98

Nonword inflections 14 1 10.95 1.31 .232 11.06 1.97

Analogies 18 1 6.84 3.52 3.09**2 9.45 2.45

**p < .01


between Real-Word Inflections and Receptive Language. Given this pattern and since the groups did not differ on non-verbal intelligence, and there were no signifi-cant differences between grades on most measures, the data of the two grades were amalgamated into one group (N = 50, mean age = 90 months, SD = 6.24 months). This increased the statistical power. Descriptive statistics for the new amalgamated group are presented in Table 14.2, and the correlations appear in Table 14.3. Overall, one should note that all the morphological awareness tasks are highly cor-related with each other and with measures of oral language. Again, the only excep-tion is the lack of a significant correlation between the Real-Word Inflections task and the Receptive Language task.

Paired samples t-tests examined whether there was a significant difference between performance on the productive, expressive Oral Comprehension measure, and the Receptive Language, both of which had 20 items. Children performed sig-nificantly better on the Receptive Language task than on the Oral Comprehension production task, t(49) = 21.96, p < .001.

As for the tasks focusing on inflectional morphology, an examination of the percentages in Table 14.2 indicates that the mean scores on the more demanding Analogies task are much lower than the tasks that are more receptive in nature. Paired t-tests revealed the differences between Real-Word Inflections and the Analogies task, and between Nonword Inflections and the Analogies task were significant, t(49) = 12.14, p < .001 and t(49) = 13.57, p < .001, respectively.

Table 14.2 Descriptive statistics for all measures (N = 50)

Measure Mean SD Percentage correct

Receptive language 14.18 2.80 71Oral comprehension 4.32 3.63 22Receptive vocabulary 20.58 6.29 53Morphological vocabulary 13.44 1.88 96Real-word inflections 11.16 1.88 79Nonword inflections 11.02 1.73 78Analogies 8.46 3.13 47

Table 14.3 Pearson inter-correlations across all measures (N = 50)

Measure 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

1. Receptive language 12. Oral comprehension .54** 13. Receptive vocabulary .58** .60** 14. Morphological vocabulary .53** .29* .46** 15. Real-word inflections .16 .49** .32* .38** 16. Nonword inflections .34* .54** .55** .34* .50** 17. Analogies .49** .64** .62** .48** .29* .45** 1

*p < .05**p < .01


Predictors of Inflectional Morphology

In order to find out whether performance on inflectional morphological tasks can be understood by considering vocabulary and grammatical skills, hierarchical linear regression analyses (Stepwise) were run. For each of the three inflectional morphology tasks, three oral language proficiency tasks (Oral Comprehension, Receptive Vocabulary, and Morphological Vocabulary) were rotated on individual steps as independent variables.1 Regression analyses are presented in Table 14.4.

Predictors of Real-Word Inflections. When Morphological Vocabulary was entered first, the Receptive Vocabulary task did not account for unique variance above that provided by the Morphological Vocabulary measure (3%, ns). However, the Morphological Vocabulary measure did account for unique variance above that provided by the Receptive Vocabulary task (6%, p < .05). Oral Comprehension accounted for unique significant variance regardless of the step it was entered on (Step 1 = 24%, p < .001; Step 3 = 14%, p < .05), with only the Morphological Vocabulary measure explaining significant unique variance over and above that explained by Oral Comprehension (6%, p < .05). In other words, Real-Word Inflection was explained uniquely by Oral Comprehension and by Morphological Vocabulary.

Predictors of Nonword Inflections. Within these models, the Oral Comprehension task and Receptive Vocabulary measure accounted for significant unique variance, regardless of the step on which they were entered (variance accounted for ranged from 6–29%, p < .05–.01, and 6–31%, p < .05–.01, respectively). The Morphological Vocabulary measure only accounted for significant variance on step 1 in these particular regression models presented, and lost its unique contribution when entered after Receptive Vocabulary (1%, ns) and after Oral Comprehension (3%, ns). Given that the words in this measure are unrelated to the nonwords tested in the measure, this is not surprising.

Predictors of the Analogies task. Similar to the Real-Word Inflections task, both the Oral Comprehension and Morphological Vocabulary measures accounted for significant unique variance, regardless of what step they were entered on (variance accounted for ranged from 12 to 41%, p < .01, and 5 to 23%, p < .05–.01, respec-tively). While the Receptive Vocabulary measure contributed unique significant variance when entered on Step 2 (8–19%, p < .01 respectively), when entered last, it did not account for significant variance above and beyond both Oral Comprehension and Morphological Vocabulary. Given that five of the vocabulary items in this mea-sure appeared in the Morphological Vocabulary measure, this finding highlights the importance of knowing the word being inflected.

1 Receptive language is not presented within these regression models as it was not significant beyond step 1 and did not change the overall model.


Tabl

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Pred

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task

s –

mul

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reg

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tabl

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= 5

0)

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nalo

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Step

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.49

.24

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.54

.29

19.4

0**

.64

.41

33.4

8**

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ecep

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3.0

01.0

5.3

6.0

86.

24**

.35

.08

7.11

**3

Mor

phol

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al

voca

bula

ry.2

8.0

64.

12*

.10

.01

.52

.25

.05

4.81

*

2M

orph

olog

ical

vo

cabu

lary

.25

.06

3.92

*.1

9.0

32.

37.3

2.0

98.

98**

3R

ecep

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voca

bula

ry.0

9.0

1.3

0.3

2.0

64.

17*

.24

.03

3.12

1M

orph

olog

ical

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lary

.34

.14

7.86

**.3

4.1

16.

05*

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.23

14.5

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8.0

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45.5

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9.1

915

.32*

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Ora

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48.

91**

.32

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4.75

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3.1

211

.46*

*1

Rec

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.32

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5.29

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5.3

121

.17*

*.6

1.3

728

.07*

*2

Mor

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73.

80.1

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1.5

6.2

6.0

54.

25*

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8.91

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75*

.43

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11.4

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*p <

.05

**p

< .0


Discussion

Studying morphological skills in beginning L2 learners opens an interesting win-dow into how linguistic skills develop, the relations among them, and the emer-gence of metalinguistic skills. In this chapter, we began to explore the relations between oral language and aspects of morphological skills in HFL. Clearly, mor-phological skills, like other language skills, develop as a function of exposure to language and literacy. It is noteworthy that the HFL children who were in Grade 2 had somewhat better vocabulary, morphological and syntactic skills than their counterparts in Grade 1. However, these skills take time to develop, and thus the differences between Grade 1 and Grade 2 did not reach statistical significance on any of the measures except for one of the inflectional morphology tasks.

The picture that emerges from the analysis we have carried out so far is that side by side with a growing repertoire of Hebrew vocabulary, grammatical skills and sentence comprehension, rudiments of various inflectional skills are already part of the linguistic skills of primary school children who have had 1–2 years of exposure to Hebrew within a formal classroom context. We also found, as might be expected, that children were more successful on receptive morphology tasks that required children to attend to the inflectional elements and respond to guided questions targeting the functions of those inflections. They had more difficulty however on an expressive task that required them to utilize their morphological awareness and generate a new answer.

Children’s performance demonstrated an increasing awareness of some morpho-logical rules, and a growing ability to recognize and isolate morphemes that mark Hebrew inflections.2 Independent of familiarity with the meaning of the stem, children demonstrated an increasing ability to utilize analogies involving cardinal rules for inflections of nouns and verbs, based on gender and number, and apply that knowledge to generate morphologically correct inflections.

The errors that children make are highly informative of what they have already learned. For example, children heard the noun-pair beitzim-beitza [eggs, (feminine, plural), egg (feminine, singular)], followed by zeitim- [olives (masculine, plural)]. In this case children were supposed to produce the singular version zayit (olive). Note that the correct response is different from the noun pattern beitza provided in the analogy. A common error was for children to rely on the beitza analogy and produce zayta. In other words, they noted the noun pattern of the example which is typical of feminine nouns in Hebrew that often end in /ah/ and applied it to zeitim.

As another illustration, children heard the high frequency verb-pair rotzeh-rotzah [want (masculine, present tense, singular) – want (feminine, present tense, singular)], followed by oxel [eat (masculine, present tense, singular)]. In this case the correct response is oxelet [eat (feminine, present tense, singular)]. Again one of the fre-quently noted errors was for children to mimic the pattern presented in the first pair, thus offering oxlah.

2 It should be noted that item analysis based on various morpheme types is currently under way.


Typically, in Hebrew, the inflection of masculine nouns from singular to plural involves the addition of /im/, for example, yeled – yeladim (child–children). However, a special pattern applies to nouns that often come in pairs. In this case, /ayim/ is added to the stem, for example, ayin (eye)-eynayim (eyes). When children were given the noun pair ayin-eynayim, followed by /yad/ (hand) many responded with yadim instead of yadayim (hands). It appears that many of these beginning HFL children have already acquired the basic default concatenating rule of adding /im/ to the noun, but they over-generalized this rule to the special case of the “zugiyim” (i.e., the plural noun pairs). As children are working their way towards correctly inflecting words, they tend to apply high frequency, salient, simple inflec-tional patterns such as those involving male–female nouns, as well as the cardinal manner of marking plurality.

As for predictors of emerging inflectional morphology skills, this exploratory study showed that sentence comprehension accounts for unique significant variance in children’s ability to correctly apply rudiments of inflectional morphology.3 This observation is valid whether the task requires children to focus on inflections of real words or nonwords. They are increasingly aware of inflection patterns related to aspects such as male/female nouns, singular/plural nouns (male/female), plural noun pairs, possessive (mine, him, us), and verb inflections (male/female, singular/plural). Children who are better able to comprehend sentences and respond correctly when asked to provide a missing word in sentences, are also more successful on the more analytic morphological inflection tasks targeted in this chapter.

Vocabulary knowledge also aids children. Clearly, general vocabulary knowledge is related to various aspects of inflectional morphology. At the same time, as the analysis involving the Real-Word Inflections task indicated, being familiar with the lexical items being tested proved to be more important for the successful inflections of specific words than general vocabulary knowledge.

The Nonword Inflections task can be thought of as a metalinguistic application of inflectional rules to unfamiliar words. Findings indicate that general Receptive Vocabulary skills contribute significantly to children’s ability to apply simple inflec-tional rules, even when the students are not familiar with the meaning of the specific words. General vocabulary skills and general emerging syntactic skills play a pivotal role in the emergence of basic morphological principles in HFL children, though familiarity with specific vocabulary items appears to provide an additional important scaffold for novice Hebrew L2 learners. Jointly these two sets of language skills (syntactic skills and vocabulary) explain between 30 and 40% of the variance on morphological receptive skills, and over 50% of the variance on the expressive morphological Analogies task.

It is important to caution, however, that no causal claims can be made, and indeed it is reasonable to hypothesize that over time one would find mutually enhancing relationship between morphological skills, syntactic skills, and vocabulary, such that

3 We plan to analyze items by category types (e.g., plural, plural pairs, past tense) once data collection is complete.


those children who have better developed vocabulary and morphological skills are likely better able to comprehend sentences, and vice versa. The current study shows that this observation is applicable to young HFLs just the way it is to young mono-lingual learners. While it remains to be seen how individual differences on these linguistic measures is related, and perhaps bootstrapped, to the emergence of reading and spelling skills, it is nevertheless noteworthy that elements of inflectional skills are already part of the linguistic repertoire of primary school children who have had 1–2 years of exposure to Hebrew within a formal classroom context.

Acknowledgments We wish to thank the staff and children at Associated Hebrew Day School (Neptune Branch) in Toronto for their support and patience. We are also grateful to the University of Toronto for enabling access to undergraduate interns.

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