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ERIC Number: EJ1340587
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2022-Jul
Pages: 30
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0305-0009
EISSN: N/A
Input Effects in the Acquisition of Verb Inflection: Evidence from Emirati Arabic
Szreder, Marta; de Ruiter, Laura E.; Ntelitheos, Dimitrios
Journal of Child Language, v49 n4 p684-713 Jul 2022
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.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: United Arab Emirates
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A