The study characterizes developmental trends in early Hebrew clause-combining (CC) by analyzing the interplay between linguistic form and communicative function in different interactional settings. Analysis applied to all utterances produced by three children aged 2;0–3;0 who combined two or more clauses, either self-initiated or on the basis of adult input. Ten types of CC were analyzed for marking by connectives (e.g. the Hebrew equivalents of ‘and’, ‘that’, ‘so’). Four shared consecutive developmental phases emerged: non-marking; partial marking by ‘and’ and ‘that’; use of ‘but’ and ‘because’, favored significantly in interlocutor-supported contexts; marking of adverbial relations and more varied use of še- ‘that’. These CC processes are interpreted as reflecting general properties of language development, in the form of gradually increasing specification of form–function relations under the impact of interlocutor–child interactive support combined with Hebrew-particular typological factors.

Major large-scale research projects in the early years of developmental psycholinguistics were English-based, yet even then numerous studies were available or under way in a range of different languages (Ferguson & Slobin, 1973). Since then, the field of cross-linguistic child language research has burgeoned in several directions. First, rich information is now available on the acquisition of dozens of languages from around the world in numerous language families, spearheaded by the five-volume series edited by Slobin (1985–1997) and complemented by in-depth examination of specific constructions – e.g. causative alternation, motion verbs, passive voice, subject elision, noun compounding – in various languages, culminating in an in-depth examination of the acquisition of ergativity in over a dozen languages (Bavin & Stoll, 2013). A second fruitful direction is the application of carefully comparable designs targeting a range of issues among children acquiring different languages, including: production of early lexico-grammatical constructions (Slobin, 1982), sentence processing comprehension (MacWhinney & Bates, 1989), expression of spatial relations (Bowerman, 2011), discourse construction of oral narratives based on short picture series (Hickmann, 2003) and longer storybooks (Berman & Slobin, 1994), and extended texts in different genres (Berman, 2008). Taken together, research motivated by the question of what is particular and what universal in child language highlights the marked, and early, impact of ambient language typology on processes of language acquisition. The challenge remains to operationalize such insights by means of psychologically sound and linguistically well-motivated measures for evaluating the interplay between the variables of developmental level, linguistic domain, and ambient language typology.

The present study examined the types of linguistic knowledge that affect children's ability to understand and produce novel compounds in Hebrew. Sixty children aged 3;0–9;0, and 12 adults, were asked to interpret and to produce novel Noun + Noun compounds. Their comprehension was in advance of their production. In comprehension, morphological form of head nouns had little effect: from age four, children did equally well on all the compound forms tested; they identified head nouns and also possible relations between heads and their modifiers. In production, though, knowledge of morphological form was crucial. The fewer the changes children had to make in the forms of head nouns, the earlier they mastered that compound pattern. Finally, children who produced novel compounds correctly were also able to interpret novel compounds, but not vice versa.

This paper outlines functionally motivated quantifiable criteria for characterizing different facets of discourse – global-level principles, categories of referential content, clause-linking complex syntax, local linguistic expression and overall discourse stance – in relation to the variables of development, genre and modality. Concern is with later, school-age language development, in the conviction that the long developmental route of language acquisition can profitably be examined in the context of extended discourse. Findings are reviewed from a cross-linguistic project that elicited narrative and expository texts in both speech and writing at four age groups: (9–10 years, 12–13, 16–17 and adults). Clear developmental patterns emerge from middle childhood to adulthood, with significant shifts in adolescence; global-level text organization is mastered earlier in narratives than in expository essays, but the latter promote more advanced use of local-level lexicon and syntax; and spoken texts are more spread out than their denser written counterparts in clause-linkage, referential content and lexical usage. These and other findings are discussed in terms of the growth and reorganization of knowledge about types of discourse and text-embedded language use.

The study considers implications of our findings regarding pre-school acquisition of Hebrew inflectional morphology (Berman 1981). Children resolve ‘opacities’ by reference to various types of ‘paradigms’. These are related to the distinction between transient and more widespread deviations from prescriptive norms, in an attempt to account for interactions between child language and language change. While pre-school acquisition is crucially affected by peer input, the grammar is subsequently reshaped by orthography and by formal study, yielding a complex interaction between concrete vs. abstract bases of Hebrew linguistic competence. Further research is needed to examine when and how the peculiarly Semitic constructs of consonantal root plus morphological pattern are acquired.

The distribution of a number of syntactic structures in the speech output of 102 Israeli preschoolers was examined. Findings on the proportion of grammatically analysable clauses, the patterning of word order in Hebrew child language, and the emergence of syntactic connectedness through coordination and subordination of clauses are reported. Our analysis reveals that while in some areas there are clearly age-related differences among preschool children, other types of syntactic patternings exhibit a stable behaviour. We refer to the importance of integrating findings for a wide variety of seemingly unrelated syntactic constructions across different discourse modes. We also claim that complex interactions between structural, semantic and pragmatic factors underlie the child's acquisition of syntax.

Verb-pattern alternation in Hebrew is characterized in terms of consonantal roots associated with a fixed set of morphological patterns in the lexicalized expression of categories such as causative, reflexive, inchoative and passive. It is assumed that at first Hebrew-speaking children will use a verb-root in one invariant pattern, and hence may also neutralize required morpho-semantic distinctions. Observational and experimental data from children aged 2; 6 to 5; 6 reveal a development in linguistic control of the system from non-alternation to near-mastery, with the concepts of causativity and distinctions in transitivity being lexicalized earlier than others. These findings are discussed in terms of the interplay between linguistic and conceptual development, and the evidence from language acquisition for linguistic theory.

The study examines children's command of transitivity permutations in Hebrew, where a change in verb-argument syntax entails a change in verb-morphology. 30 children aged two, three and eight were required to produce existing and novel Hebrew verbs differing in transitivity. Younger children showed a good grasp of the syntax and semantics, but not the morphological marking of transitivity, three-year-olds did much better, and eight-year-olds produced mainly adultlike responses. Results were higher on existing verbs than on novel forms. Direction of change had little effect with existing verbs, but with novel verbs success was much higher in changing intransitive to transitive forms than the converse. Some alternations proved easier than others, e.g. intransitive activity verbs in the basic pa'al verb-pattern yielded more causative hif'il forms than intransitive inchoative verbs in the nif'al pattern. Findings throw light on the development of derivational morphology, item-based versus class-based learning, and the impact of lexical productivity and language-particular properties on acquisition.

The paper examines the acquisition of selected aspects of the inflectional system of Modern Hebrew, a language rich in bound morphology. By age three, children acquire the major inflectionally marked categories of the system, in the sense that they make semantically relevant distinctions of tense, person, number, and gender. Certain morphologically complex forms are simplified by neutralization or reformulation or by analytic paraphrases of bound constructions. Various anomalous forms are handled by regularization of lexical exceptions or by conflating forms belonging to different lexical patterns, while forms which are opaque due to neutralization of historically distinct root consonants or to inaccessibility of rules governing their alternations are processed by reference to certain ‘paradigms’ taken as basic.

Given the nature of Hebrew as a highly synthetic language with rich bound morphology, an attempt was made to establish a measure corresponding to the MLU for a language such as English. The method of calculating MPU (morpheme-per-utterance) which is described here was tried out on 38 Hebrew-speaking children aged 2;0 to 3;0, and measured for internal consistency against different types of elicitation procedures, and for validity by comparison with the subjects' performance on a specially-devised measure of syntactic–semantic development. The results clearly indicate that the MPU is a useful developmental index of the linguistic proficiency of two- to three-year-old Hebrew speakers. Implications of this finding for intra-linguistic and cross-linguistic evaluation are then discussed.

The paper examines two types of texts, personal experience narratives and expository discussions, dealing with the shared theme of interpersonal conflict. Both were produced by the same 80 subjects, participants in a crosslinguistic study on developing literacy: gradeschoolers aged 9;0 to 10;0, twelve-to-thirteen-year-old junior high school students, sixteen-to-seventeen-year-old high school students, and graduate-level university students. The study reported here aims to demonstrate that inter-genre differentiation is evident from an early age and is reflected by distinct forms of expression across different interlocking linguistic systems. In keeping with the focus on relations between linguistic forms and discourse functions that motivates our study, we further aim to show how particular grammatical elements can fulfil different discourse functions across development. To this end, we analysed several different lexical and morphosyntactic constructions in 160 Hebrew-language texts as diagnostic of inter-genre distinctiveness: subjectless constructions; verbless copular clauses; verb types and the temporal categories of verb tense and mood, including lexical expressions of modality in the two genres. Results show that narratives are clearly distinguished from expository texts along all these dimensions; these distinctions are evident from the youngest age group we considered; and with age, inter-genre differentiation emerges as more moderately dichotomous. We concluded from this that maturely proficient text construction is able to combine expository-type generalizations with narrative event-description and to intersperse narrative-type illustrative episodes with expository formulation of ideas.

The paper examines the first twenty verb-forms recorded for six Hebrew-speaking children aged between 1;2 and 2;1, and how they evolve into fully inflected verbs for three of these children. Discussion focuses first on what word-forms children initially select for the verbs they produce, what role these forms play in children's emergent grammar, and how emergent grammar is reflected in the acquisition of fully inflected forms of verbs. Children's early verb repertoire indicates that they possess a strong basis for moving into the expression of a variety of semantic roles and the syntax of a range of different verb–argument structures. On the other hand, children's initial use of verbs demonstrates that they still need to acquire considerable language-particular grammatical knowledge in order to encode such relations explicitly. This language-particular knowledge demonstrates a clear pattern of acquisition, in which aspect precedes inflectional marking for gender, followed by tense, and then by person.