Work

A corpus analysis of child and child-directed speech in Palestinian Arabic: A first approach to syntactic development

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: We present a new corpus of child and child-directed speech (CDS) in Palestinian Arabic. It includes transcriptions following the CHILDES guidelines and features recordings of 16 monolingual Palestinian Arabic-speaking children with an age range of 19-58 months and their adult interlocutors. We analyse the children's morphosyntactic development and identify a variety of target word orders (45 in child speech, 50 in CDS), with prevalent SV(O) structures; we also found high rates of null subjects in both populations, marginal errors in children's verbal agreement morphology, and early emergence of serial verb constructions, observed from 23 months of age.

Source: Journal of Child Language

DOI: 10.1017/s030500092510007x

Authors: Tala Nazzal, Anna Gavarró

Institutions: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, An-Najah National University

Language: English

Topic: Language Development and Disorders

Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,550

Funders: An-Najah National University, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona