BILINGUALISM: PERSPECTIVES FROM COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND NEUROSCIENCE

Anat Prior
This paper presents a selective review of recent research findings in the domain of bilingualism. It sets out by examining the critical period hypothesis for secondlanguage learning, and addresses alternative competing explanations for welldocumented age effects. The paper then describes cognitive models of bilingual language representation, and presents studies addressing the issues of semantic representation in bilinguals, and activation patterns of the two languages in comprehension and production. A neuroscientific perspective on bilingual language representation is then offered, and findings are presented from brain-imaging studies. The conclusion reached is that the neural representation of the two languages is influenced both by the age of acquisition and by proficiency, depending on the specific linguistic domain examined. Finally, a novel line of research addressing the possible consequences of bilingualism for cognition more generally is presented, with the conclusion that bilingualism can have a beneficial effect on executive function and cognitive flexibility.

THE INSTRUCTION OF ARABIC IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION – ARE GRAMMATICAL FORMS INEVITABLE?

Shosh Ben-Ari
In the instruction of the Arabic language in Israel, both in high schools and in universities, the translation system is widely accepted as almost the sole means of comprehending a written text. The existing textbooks aim to address the task of transferring from one language to the other, while focusing on the Arabic grammar and the normative syntax as the main parts of the study of the language.
While the entire Arab world is debating the renewal of the Arabic language in the age of globalization, and voices demanding change are being heard, in Israel the teaching is still based on methods that have been used since the beginning of the last century. In addition, the newest textbooks available do not deal with the current challenges of the instruction of Arabic: changes that are a result of new terms and terminology, the expansion of the new means of mass media among Arabic speakers, and the creation of new literary genres in addition to the existing ones, and sometimes in their stead. These cause the creation of a new linguistic reality that should be taken into account while teaching the contemporary language of the media.
It should also be borne in mind that many of those who study the Arabic language in Israeli universities are not linguists, but rather history and social science scholars, and the study of grammar with which they are not acquainted often stalls their ability to acquire reading comprehension skills, and impedes many. In this article, I will discuss the omission of topics that to this day constitute an integral part of the instruction of Arabic as a foreign language.

REVERSED KINSHIP TERMS IN NEGEV ARABIC

Roni Henkin
In a direct system of kinship address terms, a mother addresses her son as “son.” However, many Arabic dialects use reversed kinship terms, whereby a senior addressing junior kin specifies the relation of the former to the latter. Therefore, a mother would address her son as “mum.”
As a contact dialect, Negev Arabic has merged two sets of reversed kinship address forms: a bipolar Syro-Palestinian set, whereby mother and son address each other reciprocally as “(my) mum;” and a Beduin one, whereby she addresses him as “your mother.” Moreover, direct forms are also used, and some of the direct and reversed forms have diminutive variants. This makes a potential total of at least ten variants for each junior kin member.
Such a large inventory of variants naturally invites functional differentiation. The choice of kinship addressive terms is influenced by dialectal, sociodemographic, pragmatic, and stylistic factors that will be discussed in the paper, based on a recorded Negev Arabic corpus of personal stories and folk stories.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF MORPHOLOGICAL PROCESSING IN VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION: FROM CONCRETE TO ABSTRACT REPRESENTATIONS

Michal Raveh, Rachel Schiff, Reut Yamin, Avital Fighel, Shani Kahta
In order to understand the effect of written language exposure on the development of morphemic representations in the mental lexicon, the implicit morphological knowledge of young readers at different levels of reading experience was investigated in a series of three studies. Morphological knowledge was examined using the priming paradigm, which reflects morphological knowledge in unconscious and automatic word recognition processes. The first study, examining regular morphological structures, found morphological priming effects in young readers starting from the second grade. Very early in reading acquisition, young readers parse words into their morphemic constituents during word recognition.
The second study, examining semantically inconsistent morphological structures, found that morphological priming was influenced by semantic properties in young but not in more experienced readers. In the third study, examining orthographically inconsistent morphological structures, morphological priming was influenced by orthographic variance in the surface structure of words in both young and more experienced readers. These studies shed light on the development of morphological knowledge. When there is inconsistency in the root’s surface form, the consolidation of a single representation of the root is a gradual process. As the reader becomes more skilled, the morphological representations gradually become more abstract, abstracting away from inconsistent changes in surface forms.

THE EFFECT OF EXPLICIT INSTRUCTION ON THE ACQUISITION OF A MORPHOLOGICAL RULE IN CHILDREN: EVIDENCE FROM LEARNING AN ARTIFICIAL MORPHOLOGICAL RULE

Sara Ferman and Avi Karni
Controversy exists regarding the preferred method of instruction of a new morphological rule: explicit or implicit. Instruction is explicit or implicit when learners do or do not receive information concerning rules underlying the respective input. This issue is especially important in children since implicit learning matures very early in childhood, while explicit learning emerges later and continues to improve until young adulthood. In a recent study, eight-year-olds who learned an artificial morphological rule (AMR) in an implicit-inductive manner failed to generalize the rule to new items (Ferman & Karni, 2010).
The current study was designed to investigate the effect of explicit-deductive instruction of the same AMR in eight-year-olds. The AMR consisted of phonological transformations of verbs expressing a semantic distinction, whether the preceding noun was animate or inanimate. In the current study, an explicitdeductive explanation of the nature of the rule was provided. In both studies, we followed systematically the learning process of the AMR in eight-year-olds, conducting judgment and speech production tasks, employing repeated and new items, and measuring accuracy and speed. The results of the current study were analyzed and compared to the results of the eight-years-olds in the previous study.
The findings showed that the explicit instruction had a positive effect on learning to use the repeated items, and particularly on generalizing the AMR to new items; 7/8 of explicit learners were able to generalize the AMR to new items correctly – though at the cost of speed. The results suggest that the declarative memory is immature at the age of eight, and explicit instruction may activate the learning processes necessary for generalizing a morphological rule.

WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM IRREGULAR NOUN INFLECTION IN HEBREW?

Vered Vaknin
Research on several Indo-European languages attests to notable difficulties in the inflection of irregular nouns and verbs. In these languages, however, morphological and phonological factors are intertwined in a way that obscures the source of the difficulties. Hebrew allows for isolation of morphological and phonological factors in nominal inflection. Three experiments demonstrated that, as in Indo-European languages, nominal inflection of irregular nouns in Hebrew is slower than that of regular nouns and involves more errors. In addition, when phonological alterations to the noun’s stem occur with the inflection, this becomes an additional source of irregularity, which also taxes the inflectional process in reaction time and error rate. The empirical results underline the power of the default automatic suffix concatenation process as the main cause of the difficulties in irregular inflection.
A theoretical contribution of this study is an interpretation of the irregularity effect based on a morphological analysis that views Hebrew as having a linear rather than a non-linear morphology. The stem-suffix match is suggested as the dominant factor affecting the inflectional process, and as responsible for the difficulties in irregular inflections. It is argued that the differences between the inflection of regular and irregular nouns can easily and adequately be explained as resulting from a mismatch between a stem and an affix.

CRITERIA FOR GOOD ARGUMENTS

Amnon Glassner
A good argument for justifying knowledge and/or beliefs is one that may be justified in and of itself, as well as in comparison with competing arguments. A good argument must: a) include a clear and unambiguously articulated central claim and supporting reasons; b) have reasons that are relevant to the central claim or another reason; which include evidence and theoretical explanations; which are unambiguous and logical with respect to their support of the claim and of each other; which are acceptable according to the rules of justification of the field with which the argument deals, and which are sufficiently grounded, explicit and credible to justify their use; c) cover as many relevant aspects of the field about which the argument is being made; and d) stand up satisfactorily to competing arguments, as well as opposing evidence, theoretical explanation and reservations of various kinds. Using these criteria combined with antilogos procedure in order to identify flaws in reasoning, suggests systemic and comprehensive evaluation of the argument’s justification.

THE TEACHER AS PORTRAYED IN ISRAELI NEWSPAPERS

Merav Asaf, Yocheved Bezalel, Ron Hoz, Nurit Elam, Anat Kainan
We wished to examine how teachers are portrayed in the Israeli newspapers. To this end, we analyzed 160 newspaper reports from the weekend editions of five newspapers. Findings indicate that: 1) the major characters associated with education or teaching are politicians and public figures; 2) the teachers, mostly female, are concealed from the readers in most of the reports, or are referred to as an anonymous group that, furthermore, are associated with an intellectually dull, visionless, and violent reality to which they react incompetently and have little effect; and 3) improvement in the educational or social domains can occur only as a result of outside intervention. Five groups could profit from this image of teachers: politicians, parents, school management, commercial organizations, and academe.