ABSTRACT
The present chapter considers knowledge of the morphological class of adjectives in Hebrew-speaking SLI compared with NLA school children. We argue that the domain of derivational morphology is particularly appropriate for the investigation of linguistic disorders in SLI school children because knowledge of obligatory grammatical morphology is so well established and automatic in this age period that it would not serve as a good diagnostic. Derivational morphology, in contrast, is a semiproductive, rich, and complex system, and it demonstrates sufficient semantic and structural diversity to constitute an appropriate diagnostic tool for elementary school age. The category of Hebrew adjectives was selected because it is noncanonical in a number of senses, on the one hand, whereas it maps a variety of meanings onto various types of Hebrew morphological structure, on the other hand.
