A corpus analysis of child and child-directed speech in Palestinian Arabic: A first approach to syntactic development
Publication Type
Original research
Authors

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.

Journal
Title
Journal of Child Language
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Publisher Country
United Kingdom
Indexing
Scopus
Impact Factor
2.0
Publication Type
Online only
Volume
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Year
2025
Pages
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