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Input effects in the acquisition of verb inflection: Evidence from Emirati Arabic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 May 2021

Marta SZREDER ,
Laura E. DE RUITER Open the ORCID record for Laura E. DE RUITER [Opens in a new window]  and
Dimitrios NTELITHEOS
Marta SZREDER*
Affiliation:
Department of Speech Language Pathology, United Arab Emirates University
Laura E. DE RUITER
Affiliation:
Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development, Tufts University, USA
Dimitrios NTELITHEOS
Affiliation:
Department of Speech Language Pathology, United Arab Emirates University
*
Address for correspondence: Marta Szreder, United Arab Emirates University College of Medicine and Health Sciences, Department of Speech Language Pathology, PO Box 15551 Al Ain, United Arab Emirates. E-mail: marta.szreder@uaeu.ac.ae
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Abstract

This study investigates the acquisition of the Imperfective verb inflection paradigm in Emirati Arabic (EA), to determine whether the learning process is sensitive to the phonological and typological properties of the input. We collected data from 48 participants aged 2;7 to 5;9 years, using an elicited production paradigm. Input frequencies of inflectional contexts, verb types and tokens were obtained from corpora of child-directed and adult EA. Children's accuracy was inversely related to the input frequency of inflectional contexts, but not related to type and token frequency or phonological neighborhood density. Token frequency interacted with age, such that younger children performed considerably worse on low-frequency tokens, but older children performed equally well on high- and low-frequency tokens. We conclude that learning is input-driven, but that a sufficiently regular paradigm allows children to eventually generalise across all items earlier than in previously studied European languages.

Keywords

verb inflectionmorphological acquisitionacquisition of Arabicinput-driven learningfrequency effects
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 49 , Issue 4 , July 2022 , pp. 684 - 713
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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