Factors affecting the acquisition of plural morphology in Jordanian Arabic.

Abstract

This study investigates the development of plural morphology in Jordanian Arab children, and explores the role of the predictability, transparency, productivity, and frequency of different plural forms in determining the trajectory that children follow in acquiring this complex inflectional system. The study also re-examines the development of the notion of default over several years. Sixty Jordanian children, equally divided among six age groups (three to eight years), completed an oral real-word pluralization task and a nonsense-word pluralization task. The findings indicate that feminine sound plurals are acquired before and extended to the other plural forms. Productivity and frequency seem to shape the acquisition patterns among younger children, but predictability becomes more critical at a later age. Younger children use the most productive plural as the default form, but older children tend to use two default forms based on frequency distributions in the adult language. The theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.