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Verb learning is an important part of linguistic acquisition. The present study examines the early phases of verb acquisition in Hebrew, a language with complex derivational and inflectional verb morphology, analyzing verbs in dense recordings of CDS and CS of two Hebrew-speaking parent-child dyads aged 1;8-2;2. The goal was to pinpoint those cues that help toddlers identify the root-and-pattern make-up of Hebrew verbs despite the prevalence of structural opacity and irregularity in the verbs they hear, due to a high token frequency of defective (irregular)-root verbs. The study provides a detailed account of the distribution of root types and temporal categories in Hebrew CDS and CS showing how verb specific morphological features in the form of inflectional affixes in the Modal Cluster of Infinitive Imperative and Future Tense in CDS act as distributional cues facilitating verb acquisition in CS.

This study investigates the role of phonological and morphological information in children's developing orthographies in two languages with different linguistic typologies: Hebrew, a Semitic language with a highly synthetic morphology, and Dutch, a Germanic language with a sparse morphology. 192 Israeli and 192 Belgian monolingual schoolchildren in grades 1-6 (aged 6;0-12;0) were administered respective dictation tasks in which homophonous segments were the targets. In each language, these phonologically distinct segments are neutralized phonetically but are nevertheless represented orthographically. In both languages the target segments in the test words differed along two dimensions: (1) their morphological function as part of a stem or root versus as part of an affix; and (2) their morphophonological recoverability. The spelling tests in both languages consisted of four conditions which differed in the number and type of cues for retrieving the correct spelling of homophonous graphemes. The cues were of two types: morphological cues, which offer spellers clues to the correct spelling through consistent orthography/morphology mapping regularities; and morphophonological cues, which offer spellers clues to the correct spelling through the manipulation of orthography/morphophonology conversion procedures. A central finding of this study is the differential treatment of morphological cues by Dutch and Hebrew spelling learners. When faced with neutralized segments with and without morphological function, Hebrew-speaking children find morphology an enormously helpful tool. Dutch-speaking children, in contrast, do not find morphology a good cue provider. The impact of typology on the interface between spoken and written language is invoked as an explanation of the main findings.