Acquisition of noun plurals in Egyptian‑Arabic speaking children

Abstract Research investigating Arabic-speaking children’s acquisition of noun plurals is emerging. Researchers hypothesize that, consistent with a single-route model of morphological processing, children rely more on concatenative than on non-concatenative morphological processes. This is expected because processes of affixation require few morphological changes and fewer cognitive resources than non-concatenative processes, which necessitate multiple morphological changes within a word. However, other evidence suggests that children begin to acquire non-concatenative processes at the same time as concatenative processes. We performed a corpus analysis of Egyptian Arabic-speaking children’s use of noun plurals (ages 1;7–3;7). Accuracy rates, type-token ratios, and error patterns were examined. We found that the children used both non-concatenative and concatenative morphological processes, and had overall low rates of morphological errors. Findings replicate previous work and contribute novel results to the literature. Our preliminary results support dual-route processing models of inflectional morphology.