Roots and patterns in Hebrew language development: Evidence from written morphological analogies

Morphology is one of the organizing principles of the mental lexicon. It is
especially important in Hebrew, where word structure expresses a rich array of semantic
notions. This study investigated the ability of Hebrew-speaking children to solve written
morphological analogies by reading and completing two sets of real and invented rootand
pattern-related nouns using a closed set of responses. In the first experiment, 152
gradeschoolers (2nd-6th grade) were administered an analogy task with real words,
where they had to read written stimuli and elicit root and pattern components from
them. In the second experiment, 148 gradeschoolers were administered a similar reading
task with pseudowords. In both experiments, the results clearly indicate an early and
robust ability of Hebrew-speaking children to perform morphological analogies using
both roots and patterns. Most errors involved the root morpheme rather than the
pattern morpheme, but pseudowords elicited more pattern errors. These results are
discussed in view of models of morphological processing and morpho-lexical development
in Hebrew.