Assessing Yiddish Plurals in Acquisition: Impacts of Bilingualism

The purpose of this study is to assess the acquisition of Yiddish noun plurals among bilingual Ultra-Orthodox Hasidic children in Israel. The Yiddish dialect spoken in the Israeli Hasidic community differs markedly from Standard Yiddish, our major source of knowledge about Yiddish grammar. To establish the baseline of the core nominal lexicon and the plural system IH Yiddish children are exposed to, we first administered a confrontational naming task to 48 IH men and women. Participants were asked to name 95 singular nouns from pictures and provide their plural forms. Results revealed variability in the Israeli Hasidic Yiddish nominal lexicon and plural system, showing how profoundly they both interface with Israeli Hebrew. Establishing the baseline enabled a good starting point for the developmental study of plural learning by Israeli Hasidic children. A pluralizing task was individually administered to 118 native Yiddish-speaking children and adolescents from the same community. They were asked to provide the plural form of a given singular noun. Results indicate that Yiddish-speaking children display a typical developmental trajectory despite the languages-in-contact situation, in the sense that they learn the plural forms most widely spread in their community including Modern Hebrew singular and plural forms.