This study examined the acquisition of Hebrew noun plurals in early immersion and bilingual education by focusing on performance, as well as morpho-syntactic and semantic errors in inflecting nouns. A total of 196 students from Senior Kindergarten (n = 86) and grades 1 (n = 58) and 2 (n = 53) were administered measures of inflectional morphology in Hebrew. Results indicated that children applied high frequency, salient, simple to apply inflectional patterns
involving male-female nouns, as well as the basic way of noting plurality. Two major obstacles in the pluralisation of Hebrew nouns were suffix regularity and stem transparency. Error analysis revealed three categories of responses: rule-based, analogy-based and non-strategic errors. The principal conclusion was that errors notwithstanding, young children learning
Hebrew as a foreign language are moving toward an understanding of plural formation. The development of morpho-syntactic structures gradually develops over time and with exposure to Hebrew instruction.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/25686 |
| Date | 01 January 2011 |
| Creators | Yunger, Robyn Rebecca |
| Contributors | Geva, Esther |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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