Morphological Ability among Monolingual and Bilingual Speakers in Early Childhood: The Case of Two Semitic Languages

This study is aimed at examining the possible effect of bilingualism, mother tongue and type of morphological tasks on morphological ability (specifically, morphological awareness) of preschoolers speaking in two Semitic languages: Arabic and Hebrew. Accordingly, four groups of children (mean age – 5:4) participated in this study: (1) 50 Arabic-speaking monolinguals; (2) 50 Hebrew-speaking monolinguals; (3) 50 Arabic/Hebrew bilinguals; (4) 49 Hebrew/Arabic bilinguals. Participants from two bilingual groups were sequential non-balanced bilinguals who started to learn second language at ages 3-4 in bilingual Arabic/Hebrew kindergarten. All children performed on two inflectional morphology tasks and three derivational morphology tasks in one or two appropriate languages. To examine inflectional morphology, the domain plural nouns was chosen because its` linear nature both in Hebrew and Arabic and because inflectional noun plural morphology is acquired very early. As to derivational morphology, the focus was on the verbs because of their high token frequency, early acquisition compared to nominal morphology and its importance for Semitic languages. The results demonstrate significant effects of mother tongue, bilingualism and task type on children performance. Findings show that in native language, Hebrew-speaking children achieved higher scores in most morphological tasks compared with their Arabic-speaking pears. Bilingual children outperformed monolinguals in derivational morphology. In this case, ANOVA analysis revealed significant interaction between factors of mother tongue and bilingualism: better results were obtained in Hebrew-speaking monolinguals and Arabic-speaking bilinguals. Arabic speakers demonstrated significantly better results in Hebrew than Hebrew speakers in Arabic. Analysis of the findings also show that the differences in performance on morphological tasks among experimental groups seem to relate to linguistic, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic factors. Among these factors are linguistic complexity of morphological elements, diglossia in Arabic and social-cultural characteristics of the families whose children learn in bilingual Arabic/Hebrew kindergarten.