Hebrew adjective lexicons in developmental perspective: Subjective register and morphology

The “holy grail” of developmental psycholinguistics is to understand how words – with their structure, complex relationships, breadth and depth of meaning – are learned and processed by native speakers. Developmental scientists are especially interested in ways of assessing AoA of words or word classes, such as the class of Adjectives. One possibility is to use the morphological structure of words as a criterion. However, it is not entirely clear what constitutes morphological complexity and if this could be a valid criterion for lexical knowledge. Obviously, frequency plays a major role in this process, however frequency has many faces and offers challenges such as the interface of corpora with language users, usage of spoken and written corpora, insufficiently sensitive methods of judging frequency across different word classes, and language-specific issues, such as homography in Semitic orthographies. It is especially challenging to objectively assess frequency in relation to children’s language acquisition and development. One subjective way to assess AoA, which circumvents the problems raised by objective frequency counts, is to use the ranking of words by their linguistic register by expert judges. A classification of Adjectives by register can reveal the underlying relationship between word structure, lexical semantics and levels of usage. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)