The acquisition of complex grammatical structures of a non-cognate language has been reported to be a daunting task for adult learners (Samimy and Tabuse, 1992; Bailey, 1983; Kleimann, 1977). In the case of Arabic morphology, this task is reported to be difficult not only for foreign learners (Bakalla, 1980; Neel, 1980) but also for native speakers (Omar, 1973). The current paper sets out to investigate the nature and the processes involved in the learning of Arabic subject-verb agreement structures by Australian advanced learners. The investigation employs explanations from second language acquisition (SLA) theories as well as from linguistic theories. It is hypothesised that (1) the amount and direction of information encoding (Person, Number and Gender) motivated by certain semantic categories and word order, as well as (2) the availability of discourse cues would influence the learners’ performance in subject-verb agreement tasks. The results reported in this paper indicate that these two factors are significantly important in predicting and accounting for the learners’ final linguistic achievement in this grammatical structure.
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Cited by (5)
Cited by five other publications
Raish, Michael
2021. Issues in Arabic Language Testing and Assessment. In The Cambridge Handbook of Arabic Linguistics, ► pp. 83 ff.
Karin Ryding & David Wilmsen
2021. The Cambridge Handbook of Arabic Linguistics,
Azaz, Mahmoud
2018. The link between morphosyntactic accuracy and textbook presentation: The morphosyntax of subject‐verb agreement in Arabic. Foreign Language Annals 51:4 ► pp. 831 ff.
Salameh, Eva-Kristina
2011. Grammatisk och fonologisk utveckling på svenska och arabiska vid tvåspråkig undervisning. Educare :3 ► pp. 177 ff.
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