The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the structural and morpho-phonological similarities between Arabic and Hebrew on cross-linguistic interactions. Thus, this paper presents the results of a 6-month study testing the developmental trajectory of inflectional morphology awareness skills among Arabic–Hebrew and Hebrew–Arabic emergent bilingual children.
Methods:
One hundred and four preschool bilingual and monolingual children participated in the study (mean age 5.5 years). The children were tested on a battery of verbal screening tasks to control for their general language skills. In addition, children were assessed at two time points, with an identification task and a production morphology pseudo-word test, targeting plural, dual, past tense, imperative tense, and possessive forms.
Results:
Our results showed that the Arabic bilingual learning outcomes were more prominent for inflectional paradigms with shared cross-linguistic concepts, rules, structures, and phonological representations. In addition, our study replicated previous findings on Hebrew bilingual children, showing evidence of acceleration in acquisition of dual and possessive structures in Hebrew.
Conclusion:
We conclude that emergent bilingual children, learning two typologically similar languages, show heightened awareness of the word structures in their native language. In addition, the results indicate that morphological cross-linguistic transfer is influenced by the relative morphological complexity of Arabic and Hebrew, as well as their morpho-phonological proximity.
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