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The present study examines the development of the earliest type of complex predicates to emerge in child Hebrew -- extended predicate constructions. These constructions take the form of a modal/aspectual operator followed by an infinitival verb form (e.g., "roce lesaxek" 'want to.play'), and since they serve various discursive functions (e.g., intent, desire, request), their use marks a significant development in toddlers' cognitive, linguistic, and conversational abilities. Focus here is on the three most common modal operators used in extended predicates in early child Hebrew: "roce" 'want', "yaxol" 'can', and "carix" 'need/have.to'. Analyses cover all uses of these three predicates by both children and adults, in longitudinal weekly-recorded speech samples from three Hebrew-acquiring children, starting with the earliest verb forms produced by each child and lasting for a period of over a year (age range: 1;3-2;5). Findings show the following developmental trends: (a) "roce" 'want' emerges the earliest and continues to be the most frequent of the three predicates throughout the year; (b) children favor using "roce," "yaxol," and "carix" as main predicates before they start integrating them in extended-predicate contexts; (c) early adult uses of extended predicates in child-directed speech are almost exclusively in the form of Yes/No verification questions (e.g., "ata roce laševet?" 'you want to.sit?'); and (d) as children gradually use more extended predicates, adults gradually use fewer Yes/No verification questions, and more prompts that elicit information from the children (e.g., "ma ata roce la'asot?" 'what (do) you want to.do?') while also expanding more on the children's productions. These concurrent trends show that such complex predicates develop in a piecemeal fashion, promoted by both the gradually evolving relations between children's linguistic productions and their discursive functions, and the supportive contexts provided by their adult interlocutors.

The study examines phases in developing specification of grammatical marking of emergent clause-combining (CC) as indicative of children's growing ability to integrate two or more independent predications. To this end, both intra- and inter-clausal analyses were applied to all CC utterances produced by three Hebrew-acquiring children aged 2;0-3;0, covering both child autonomous productions and adult-child co-constructed CC. Based on four phases in CC construction shared by the three children, the following developmental trends were identified for both coordination and subordination in our database. First, children start combining two predications with lexical verbs early on, but these are confined to non-marked or adult-supported constructions. Second, early connective-marked CC involves mainly verbless copular or existential clauses. And autonomously produced lexical-verb combinations marked by connectives emerge several months later. This initial "trade-off" and gradual progression in grammatical specificity to full-fledged, lexically marked CC is interpreted as reflecting the developmental route of children's early clause integration in interactive discourse.

This study focuses on adult responses to children's verb uses, the information they provide, and how they change over time. We analyzed longitudinal samples from four children acquiring Hebrew (age-range: 1;4-2;5; child verb-forms = 8,337). All child verbs were coded for inflectional category, and for whether and how adults responded to them. Our findings show that: (a) children's early verbs were opaque with no clear inflectional target (e.g., the child-form "tapes" corresponds to "letapes" 'to-climb', "metapes" 'is-climbing', "yetapes" 'will-climb'), with inflections added gradually; (b) most early verbs were followed by adult responses using the same lexeme; and (c) as opacity in children's verbs decreased, adults made fewer uses of the same lexeme in their responses, and produced a broader array of inflections and inflectional shifts. In short, adults are attuned to what their children know and respond to their early productions accordingly, with extensive 'tailor-made' feedback on their verb uses.

The study characterizes developmental trends in early Hebrew clause-combining (CC) by analyzing the interplay between linguistic form and communicative function in different interactional settings. Analysis applied to all utterances produced by three children aged 2;0-3;0 who combined two or more clauses, either self-initiated or on the basis of adult input. Ten types of CC were analyzed for marking by connectives (e.g. the Hebrew equivalents of "and", "that", "so"). Four shared consecutive developmental phases emerged: non-marking; partial marking by "and" and "that"; use of "but" and "because", favored significantly in interlocutor-supported contexts; marking of adverbial relations and more varied use of še- "that". These CC processes are interpreted as reflecting general properties of language development, in the form of gradually increasing specification of form-function relations under the impact of interlocutor-child interactive support combined with Hebrew-particular typological factors.

The study aims to account for the distribution of finite versus non-finite verbs during a developmental period when children use both types of verb forms in contexts requiring finiteness. To meet this goal, longitudinal samples from three Hebrew-acquiring children (aged 1;4-2;6) are examined from the onset of verb production and across the "optional" period in which finite and non-finite verbs occur side by side. Each verb-containing utterance is specified for structural transparency (whether the verb has a clearly unambiguous target) and for additional clausal constituents. Analysis reveals that during the "optional" period non-transparent verb forms favor elaborated syntactic environments (i.e., accompanied by objects and/or adverbs) at significantly higher rates than their transparent counterparts. These morpho-syntactic patterns in children's verb usage provide a line of explanation for the distribution of inflected versus non-inflected forms, and highlight the role of between-domain inter-relations in language acquisition.

The study investigates acquisition of verb inflections by four monolingual Hebrew-acquiring children from middle-class backgrounds, audio-recorded in longitudinal, weekly samples at a mean age-range of between 18 and 26 months. Productive use of inflectional morphology is shown to manifest increasing structural specification, as a function of children's developing knowledge of morphology-syntax interfaces illustrated by Subject-Verb agreement. The verbs used by all four children evolve from non-specified stem-like forms via sporadic structural alternations to initial productivity in the use of largely under-specified inflected forms. This process of increasing structural specification is interpreted as reflecting paradigmatic/syntagmatic interfacings in developing grammatical productivity, such that eventually a full range of inflectional contrasts is manifested in all and only appropriate syntactic environments.