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

Tala Nazzal*, Anna Gavarró

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleResearchpeer-review

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1-16
Number of pages16
JournalJournal of Child Language
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 16 Jun 2025

Keywords

  • child spontaneous production
  • corpus
  • early acquisition
  • null subjects
  • Palestinian Arabic
  • serial verb construction
  • verbal morphology
  • word order

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