Building a Grammatical Network: Form and Function in the Development of Hebrew Prepositions

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Child Language Acquisition

Background:

• Prepositions are crucial for grammatical and semantic expression.
• Understanding prepositional development in early language acquisition is key.
• Hebrew offers a unique linguistic system for studying prepositional emergence.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the developmental trajectory of prepositions in Hebrew-speaking children.
• To analyze the semantic functions and form-function relationships of prepositions.
• To model the emergence of systematicity in prepositional usage.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of a peer talk corpus from 75 Hebrew-speaking children (ages 2;6-6;0).
• Triadic conversations (45 minutes each) were recorded and analyzed.
• Network analysis and qualitative developmental analyses were employed.

Main Results:

• Prepositions served 22 functions, primarily grammatical, spatial, and temporal.
• Prepositional use increased with age, with a rise in abstract functions.
• Systematic relations emerged, forming semantic clusters of prepositional functions.

Conclusions:

• The development of prepositions reflects both lexical and syntactic growth in Hebrew.
• Children transition from simple prepositional uses to complex, abstract syntactic adjuncts.
• This developmental process enhances clause-level complexity and linguistic sophistication.