Developmental changes in using nominal number inflections in Kuwaiti Arabic

Aljenaie, Khawla; Abdalla, Fauzia; Farghal, Mohammad

doi:10.1177/0142723710393101

Cited by 43 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Moreover, the children, especially the younger ones, showed a tendency to use sound feminine plurals instead of sound masculine and broken plurals. Similar patterns were reported in studies on other Arabic dialects, such as Jordanian (Daana, ), Kuwaiti (Aljenaie, Abdalla, & Farghal, ), and Egyptian (Omar, ). Most of these studies suggest that sound feminine plurals seem to act as the default category that is acquired earlier than other forms and often extended to the expected masculine and broken plural forms.…”

Section: Studies On the Acquisition Of Arabic Plural Morphologysupporting

confidence: 87%

Concatenative and Nonconcatenative Plural Formation in L1, L2, and Heritage Speakers of Arabic

Albirini

Benmamoun

2014

The Modern Language Journal

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This study compares Arabic L1, L2, and heritage speakers’ (HS) knowledge of plural formation, which involves concatenative and nonconcatenative modes of derivation. Ninety participants (divided equally among L1, L2, and heritage speakers) completed two oral tasks: a picture naming task (to measure proficiency) and a plural formation task. The findings indicate that both L2 learners and heritage speakers have consistent problems with nonconcatenative plural morphology (particularly plurals with geminated and defective roots). However, the difficulties that heritage speakers displayed were mainly restricted to forms that are acquired late by L1 children, unlike L2 learners who displayed a sharp performance dichotomy between concatenative and nonconcatenative plurals. Furthermore, with regard to the default strategy, heritage speakers resorted to the language‐specific default form, namely the sound feminine, whereas L2 learners opted for the sound masculine, which is likely a case of adhering to a universal tendency.

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Section: Studies On the Acquisition Of Arabic Plural Morphologysupporting

confidence: 87%

Concatenative and Nonconcatenative Plural Formation in L1, L2, and Heritage Speakers of Arabic

Albirini

Benmamoun

2014

The Modern Language Journal

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“…At age seven, the acquisition of the plural is still at around 90 percent accuracy compared to adults. Aljenaie, Abdalla, and Farghal (2011), who examined the development of noun number marking, dual and plural, by Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children between the ages of four and nine years in an elicited production task, also found that correct FSP appeared more frequently than MSPs and BPs in Group 1 (four-to five-year-olds) and demonstrated near-ceiling effects in Group 2 (six-to seven-year-olds) and Group 3 (eight-to nine-year-olds). In contrast, the acquisition of the other two plural types (MSP and BP) increased in accuracy across age groups.…”

Section: Nominal Plural Morphology In Kuwaiti Arabicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Plural noun inflection in Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children with and without Specific Language Impairment

2012

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This study examined the production of three types of noun plural inflections, feminine sound plural (FSP), masculine sound plural (MSP), and broken plural (BP) in Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children with and without language impairment. A total of thirty-six Kuwaiti participants - twelve adults, twelve children with specific language impairment (SLI), and twelve typically developing age-matched controls (TD) were presented with twenty-seven pictured stimuli of real and nonsense words. The results showed that the TD children were significantly more accurate in using the required noun plural inflections than the SLI group. The TD children's preferred overgeneralization strategy was to substitute FSP for the regular MSP and irregular BP contexts much more than their peers with SLI. The performance of the SLI group also differed from that of their age-matched counterparts in the number of errors and their distribution across categories. The results are discussed in the light of relevant theories of atypical language development.

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“…Instead, DS children and young adults rely more on their environmental language input, for the plural number form is more used in JA than the dual number form. Hence, the dual number is acquired after the plural in DS, unlike in the typical children reported in Moawad ( 2006 ) and Aljenaie et al ( 2011 ), reflecting the sensitivity to the surrounding environment by individuals with DS. Thus, children and young adults with DS perform a considerable amount of dependency in using more social language (Martin et al, 2009 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 75%

“…The plural form is, however, considered as a weakness area in DS; it is the second most commonly and correctly used number after the default singular, as it is used to denote the dual number more than the typical dual form and the canonical plural form. This is the opposite of acquisition behaviour in typically developing children (Aljenaie et al, 2011 ). In addition, it is at variance with the argument that children with DS acquire the linguistic patterns at a similar phase to TDC children.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

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Grammatical number inflection in Arabic-speaking children and young adults with Down syndrome

Mashaqba

Sa'aleek

Huneety

et al. 2020

South African Journal of Communication Disorders

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Background: Individuals with Down syndrome (DS) have more difficulties with the structural aspects of language, including morphology (concatenation and non-concatenation) and syntax (word order and grammatical/concord rules), than with other language components (e.g. vocabulary, phonetics and pragmatics).Objectives: This study investigates the accuracy of grammatical number inflection produced by Jordanian Arabic-speaking children and young adults with DS. The work also examines the correlation between age and the correct production of singular, dual and plural numbers.Methods: The study involved 60 monolingual Arabic children and young adults with DS, 30 males and 30 females, enrolled at the Nazik Al Hariri Welfare Centre for Special Education, Amman. The participants were divided into three groups: KG2 (7.1–12.5 years old), school (13.10–17.6) and vocational training (18.3–27.3). The participants’ data were collected from a picture elicitation task and free speech, and the answers were recorded using a smartphone. Tokens were classified into correctly used, incorrectly used or not recognised. Proficiency percentage in using the correct number in correlation with age was calculated adopting Jia’s (2003) composite score of proficiency. The one-way analysis of variance was used to trace the impact of age on the correct performance of number. Post hoc comparisons (guided by the Scheffe test) were calculated for the cumulative results of the scale as a whole to examine the difference in the arithmetic mean between the three groups.Results: The singular form was the most used by all age groups (83.3%), followed by the plural (27%); the most delayed was dual (10.3%). Intriguingly, the dual form is the most difficult plural pattern because it was the least frequently used pattern in everyday language. Results were in line with other research on morphological markers in individuals with DS (e.g. Penke, 2018). The cumulative results statistically prove the influence of age on the correct use of grammatical number, in favour of the older two groups (total F = 29.865, at the level of significance P = 0.000), with a higher arithmetic mean of all categories (AM: KG2 = 9.00, school = 15.10, VT = 16.25). Hence, sensitivity to the correct number option increases with age although children and young adults with DS do not reach adult-like performance. The non-recognition cases of the proper number category significantly mark language delay in participants with DS.Conclusion: The study concluded that inflection for grammatical number is evidently delayed in individuals with DS. Linguistic teaching and training of children with DS (involving families, caregivers and educators) should start from childhood and continue to adulthood to improve their use of dual and plural numbers.

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Developmental changes in using nominal number inflections in Kuwaiti Arabic

Cited by 43 publications

References 22 publications

Concatenative and Nonconcatenative Plural Formation in L1, L2, and Heritage Speakers of Arabic

Concatenative and Nonconcatenative Plural Formation in L1, L2, and Heritage Speakers of Arabic

Plural noun inflection in Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children with and without Specific Language Impairment

Grammatical number inflection in Arabic-speaking children and young adults with Down syndrome

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