Adjective inflection in hebrew: A psychollinguistic study of speakers of Russian, english and arabic compared with native hebrew speakers

Abstract

This study examines Hebrew adjective inflection in 64 adult speakers of Russian, English and Arabic, and native Hebrew speakers with whom they were compared. The study evaluates participants’ performance on an original auditory judgment task which tested their ability to identify grammatical and ungrammatical attributive and predicative adjectives in various NP contexts. All groups achieved better results in sentences with attributive adjectives, and scored lower when the adjectives were in predicative position, especially when the adjectives were ungrammatical. The Russian speakers had the highest scores in the three non-native groups; the Arabic speakers achieved intermediate results, and the English speakers had the lowest scores. The native Hebrew speakers had the highest overall scores, but they, too, found judgment of adjective inflection difficult in ungrammatical contexts, especially when the noun and adjective were far apart, i.e., with adjectives in the predicative position. Performance was hampered in irregular categories (i.e., in cases of clash between noun phonology and gender). The results point to the role of processing constraints in L1 and L2 and to language typology in directing native and non-native judgment of adjective inflection.