The Acquisition of Negation in Modern Standard Arabic by Bilingual Moroccan Children

Abstract

Introduction. The present study reports results from grammaticality judgment and picture description tasks with 24 bilingual child learners of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) (and Moroccan Arabic), aged between 5;1 and 9;1. The study investigates the learners’ comprehension and production of the anaphoric la: ‘no’, verbal la, lan, lam, ma: ‘not’, and non-verbal lajsa ‘is not’. It also explores whether the complex MSA negation delays the age of acquisition of the anaphoric, verbal, and non-verbal structures. Results. Results suggested that the learners’ comprehension of negation was more robust compared to production, indicating processing difficulties associated with production of the complex MSA negation. The analysis of error patterns showed that children overutilized the anaphoric la: ‘no’ to avoid more complex structures. Interestingly, the development of negation was non-linear, displaying a U-shaped learning curve. Conclusion. The current study examined negation in the comprehension and production of Moroccan child learners of MSA. First, in line with prediction, the complex structure of MSA negation was found to delay the development of the targeted negation structures. Second, the participants’ comprehension of MSA negation was more robust compared to production. This could be explained by difficulties in the implementation of grammatical knowledge. Third, reporting individual results, the study suggested that the child learners of MSA showed a non-linear pattern of negation acquisition, displaying a U-shaped learning curve. Finally, further research is needed to investigate MSA properties because it would provide valuable test cases for various important questions in linguistic theory and language acquisition, including our understanding of the nature, development, representation, and processing of MSA.