Two paths - one goal: Vowel harmony in the acquisition of Hebrew (original) (raw)

2012, Proceedings of the 28th meeting of the Israeli Association for Theoretical Linguistics

There is much discussion in the literature on the acquisition of vowel harmony in languages with productive harmony systems (Leiwo et al. 2006 for Finnish, Altan 2007 for Turkish, among others). There is, however, little discussion on vowel harmony in languages without an active harmony grammar. In Ben-David's (2001:148) study of Modern Hebrew (henceforth: Hebrew) acquisition, final syllable doubling, resulting in identical syllabic nuclei in the final and penultimate syllables, is mentioned as the first stage of disyllabic productions. When additional syllables are added, the vowel is copied. This doubling is unaffected by vowel quality (Ben-David 2001:149) or stress (Ben-David 2001:151), and is not directly attributed to vowel harmony, but rather to a general preference for reduplicated forms and faithfulness to word-final syllables (Ben-David 2001:150). Mintz and Walker (2006) mention a role that vowel harmony possibly plays in the segmentation of strings in the acquisition of English, hypothesising that infants may show a universal predisposition to use harmony as one of their segmentation cues. In this paper, I not only show that such a predisposition exists in Hebrew, but that the acquiring infant's initial state has an active harmony grammar.

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