ABSTRACT
The first generation of children for whom Hebrew was a mother tongue acquired their language from speakers of Arabic, German, Hungarian, Russian, Yiddish, and the many other tongues spoken by those who emigrated to Palestine in the late 1800s and early 1900s. From the point of view of language-acquisition research, the sociohistorical circumstances of Hebrew as a language which was recently revived as a means of everyday spoken communication and which serves an immigrant society, a large proportion of whose members are themselves not native Hebrew speakers, are relevant in several ways. In consequence, children's "errors" often reflect usages found in less normative segments of the adult population, too, so that the relationship between child language and more general language change is particularly relevant in the acquisition of Hebrew. Children's innovations and "misusages"—particularly in the area of word-formation processes—provide rich insight into less self-conscious construals of structural properties of the language.
