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Article published In: Selected Papers from the 37th Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics
Edited by Reem Khamis and Mira Goral
[Arabic Linguistics 1:2] 2025
► pp. 168–187

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Acquisition of noun plurals in Egyptian‑Arabic speaking children

Using language corpora to inform language milestones

 | Medical University of South Carolina | University of Kansas
 | Speech Training Center for Rehabilitation
 | The City University of New York
Published online: 27 February 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/arli.00010.gha
Abstract
Research investigating Arabic-speaking children’s acquisition of noun plurals is emerging. Researchers hypothesize that, consistent with a single-route model of morphological processing, children rely more on concatenative than on non-concatenative morphological processes. This is expected because processes of affixation require few morphological changes and fewer cognitive resources than non-concatenative processes, which necessitate multiple morphological changes within a word. However, other evidence suggests that children begin to acquire non-concatenative processes at the same time as concatenative processes. We performed a corpus analysis of Egyptian Arabic-speaking children’s use of noun plurals (ages 1;7–3;7). Accuracy rates, type-token ratios, and error patterns were examined. We found that the children used both non-concatenative and concatenative morphological processes, and had overall low rates of morphological errors. Findings replicate previous work and contribute novel results to the literature. Our preliminary results support dual-route processing models of inflectional morphology.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Background
  • Plural inflections in spoken Arabic
  • Theoretical framework for nominal inflections
  • The acquisition of noun plurals across Arabic dialects: Previous findings
  • The current study
  • Method
    • About the Salama corpus
      • Participants
      • Procedure
    • Analyses
    • CLAN programs and commands
    • Reliability and disambiguation of CLAN output
  • Results
    • Order of acquisition
    • Error patterns
      • Morphological error patterns
      • Phonological and articulation error patterns
    • Comparison to other Arabic varieties
    • Discussion, limitations and future directions
  • Conclusion
  • Disclosures
  • Note
  • References
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