The emergence of subjects in Lebanese two-year-olds

• Published in: Journal of child language Vol. 51; no. 1; pp. 234 - 247
• Main Authors: ABBOUD, Layal, CHOUEIRI, Lina, SEIFEDDINE, Nour, TULLER, Laurice
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Cambridge University Press 01.01.2024
• Subjects: Adolescent; Arabic language; Child; Child Development; Child Language; Children; Children & youth; Female; Grammatical subject; Humans; Hypotheses; Language; Language Development; Language disorders; Language Impairments; Mothers; Native language acquisition; Predicate; Preferences; Semitic Languages; Sentences; Speech; Syntactic movement; Syntax; Verbs; Word Order; Young Children; Lebanon; language acquisition; Lebanese Arabic; subjects with verbal/non-verbal predicates

In Lebanese Arabic, lexical subjects may occur before or after verbs, but only before non-verbal predicates. Analysis of spontaneous language samples from 19 two-year-old children shows that postverbal (VS) and preverbal (SV) subjects emerge simultaneously. The youngest children displayed no VS-SV d...