Gender and Number Agreement in the Oral Production of Arabic Heritage Speakers

Autor/inn/en	Albirini, Abdulkafi; Benmamoun, Elabbas; Chakrani, Brahim
Titel	Gender and Number Agreement in the Oral Production of Arabic Heritage Speakers
Quelle	In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 16 (2013) 1, S.1-18 (18 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	1366-7289
DOI	10.1017/S1366728912000132
Schlagwörter	Semantics; Semitic Languages; Language Acquisition; Morphology (Languages); Nouns; Grammar; Verbs; Form Classes (Languages); Oral Language; Task Analysis; Pictorial Stimuli; Syntax + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Semantik; Arabisch; Hebräisch; Sprachaneignung; Spracherwerb; Morphology; Morphologie; Grammatik; Analytischer Sprachbau; Oral interpretation; Mündlicher Sprachgebrauch; Aufgabenanalyse; Fantasieanregung
Abstract	Heritage language acquisition has been characterized by various asymmetries, including the differential acquisition rates of various linguistic areas and the unbalanced acquisition of different categories within a single area. This paper examines Arabic heritage speakers' knowledge of subject-verb agreement versus noun-adjective agreement with the aim of contrasting their distributions and exploring areas of resilience and vulnerability within Arabic heritage speech and their theoretical implications. Two oral-production experiments were carried out, one involving two picture-description tasks, and another requiring an elicited narrative. The results of the study show that subject-verb agreement morphology is more maintained than noun-adjective morphology. Moreover, the unmarked singular masculine default is more robust than the other categories in both domains and is often over-generalized to other marked categories. The results thus confirm the existence of these asymmetries. We propose that these asymmetries may not be explained by a single factor, but by a complex set of morphological, syntactic, semantic, and frequency-related factors. (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2017/4/10