Development of Verb Inflectional Complexity in Palestinian Arabic

This study describes the development of verb inflectional morphology in an urban dialect of Palestinian Arabic (PA) spoken in northern Israel, specifically in the city of Haifa, and explores the effect of language typology on acquisition.

We analyzed naturalistic longitudinal speech samples from one monolingual Arabic-speaking girl aged 1;11-2;3 during spontaneous interactions with family members.

Initially, truncated forms ("bare stems") were common but disappeared by the end of the study. By age 1;11, the girl was in the proto-morphological stage, displaying clear three-member mini-paradigms. Affixation complexity gradually increased, with adjacent and obligatory suffixes acquired before distant and optional prefixes. The early acquisition of indicative prefixes (b-, m-) preceded the later emergence of complex proclitics (e.g., volitive d-, progressive ʕam), suggesting gradual, systematic morphological acquisition.

We propose three principles for the development of PA verb inflection: (a) Adjacency: Affixes adjacent to the base are acquired first. (b) R-salience: Suffixes are acquired earlier than prefixes. (c) Obligatoriness: Obligatory morphemes precede optional ones. These principles predict the girl's morphological development and reflect sensitivity to PA's richly inflecting typology. This study highlights the need for detailed descriptive research that is essential for understanding language acquisition processes and informing assessment tools, intervention programs, and educational curricula for PA-speaking children.