The acquisition of Hebrew plurals: the case of the missing gender category

Abstract

ABSTRACTChildren's acquisition of noun pluralization patterns in Hebrew was studied longitudinally and cross-sectionally. The data show that, through the period of acquisition (age 2–3), children make maximal use of the available morphophonological clues for pluralization; they determine their choice of the plural morpheme according to the nature of the final syllable of the noun singular. They seem totally insensitive to the semantic notion of gender which governs the choice of plurals for animate nouns, as well as to a syntactic notion of gender which in Hebrew determines noun–adjective agreement.