{"id":912,"date":"2010-10-07T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-10-07T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=912"},"modified":"2010-07-21T10:29:27","modified_gmt":"2010-07-21T08:29:27","slug":"the-acquisition-of-egyptian-arabic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=912","title":{"rendered":"The acquisition of Egyptian Arabic"},"content":{"rendered":"
The acquisition of Egyptian Arabic as a native language.<\/strong> By Margaret K. Omar<\/strong>. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2007. Pp. xxiii, 205. ISBN 9781589011687<\/a>. $29.95.<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Dimitrios Ntelitheos<\/strong><\/a>, United Arab Emirates University<\/em><\/p>\n

A republication of Margaret K. Omar\u2019s original 1973 book with the same title, this volume is the only currently available in-depth study of the developmental stages in the acquisition of Egyptian Arabic. The book is divided into seven chapters.<\/p>\n

Ch. 1 introduces the goals of O\u2019s developmental study. Methodological issues are explored, including the types of recordings, the transcription methodology, and the children who participated in the study. A structural sketch of the language is also provided. Ch. 2 discusses the living conditions, physical characteristics, and family members of the children studied.<\/p>\n

In Ch. 3, the acquisition of the phonological system is shown to proceed through three distinct stages, immediately following the babbling state: stage 1, in which children exhibit very limited phonemic repertoires with no consonant clusters; stage 2, in which children produce diphthongs and some consonant clusters although cluster simplification is still productive; and stage 3, in which children appear to have acquired adult-like phonological competency. O describes the order of acquisition for phonemes and phoneme combinations and concludes by comparing the phonological acquisition of Egyptian Arabic to phonological acquisition in other languages.<\/p>\n

In Ch. 4, O investigates early communication and the initial vocabulary of Egyptian Arabic speaking children. She discusses the results of a vocabulary comprehension test in relation to the general recognition of objects by the children, their ability to manipulate objects, and their ability to produce minimal grammatical contrasts (e.g. number, tense, voice, gender, agreement). O demonstrates that children produce vocabulary items not available in adult speech although these words are present in child-oriented adult speech (i.e. baby-talk).<\/p>\n

In Ch. 5, O discusses syntactic development. Early stages in the acquisition of Egyptian Arabic are shown to correspond to early stages in the acquisition of other languages, including a one-word and a two-word stage. O divides the subsequent multiword stage into two parts. In the early part, children display a mean utterance length of about 1.75 words and significant omission of function words. In the later part, children display a mean length utterance of 3.5\u20133.75 words and a significant decrease in the omission of function words and inflections. Subsequent sections discuss the acquisition of negation and interrogative sentences.<\/p>\n

Ch. 6 explores the development of morphology. Following a description of early morphological development, O discusses the acquisition of inflectional affixes related to number and gender.<\/p>\n

In Ch.7, O provides some concluding remarks, including the implications of her findings for theories of first language acquisition and suggestions for further research. The book ends with a short bibliography.<\/p>\n

O\u2019s volume is currently the only book-length study of the acquisition of a dialect of Arabic. As such, it remains a valuable reference and an essential read for those interested in the acquisition of Semitic languages and in language acquisition in general.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The acquisition of Egyptian Arabic as a native language. By Margaret K. Omar. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2007. Pp. xxiii, 205. ISBN 9781589011687. $29.95. Reviewed by Dimitrios Ntelitheos, United Arab Emirates University A republication of Margaret K. Omar\u2019s original 1973 book with the same title, this volume is the only currently available in-depth study […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=912"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":913,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912\/revisions\/913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}