Gender and number agreement in the oral production of Arabic Heritage speakers

被引:39
作者
Albirini, Abdulkafi [1 ]
Benmamoun, Elabbas [2 ]
Chakrani, Brahim [3 ]
机构
[1] Utah State Univ, Dept Languages Philosophy & Speech Commun, Logan, UT 84322 USA
[2] Univ Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801 USA
[3] Michigan State Univ, E Lansing, MI 48824 USA
关键词
Arabic; heritage speakers; agreement morphology; SPANISH; ENGLISH; INPUT; MORPHOLOGY; FEATURES; CONTEXT; VERBS; AGE;
D O I
10.1017/S1366728912000132
中图分类号
H0 [语言学];
学科分类号
030303 ; 0501 ; 050102 ;
摘要
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.
引用
收藏
页码:1 / 18
页数:18
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