الفهرس 
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Abstract
Language acquisition is a universal process, by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate. Children typically begin by producing a small number of plural forms. The present study investigates the acquisition of Egyptian plural forms for Arabic children. Egyptian Colloquial Arabic has both regular ”sound” plurals which are formed by the attachment of a Feminine or Masculine suffix to the singular stem, and Broken ”irregular” Plurals which are formed by an internal change in the singular stem. A plural elicitation task was administered to 56 Egyptian Arabic speaking children aged (2; 6 to 6; 6 years old). Participants are divided into two groups; the first group consists of 31 participants and the second group consists of 25 participants. Each group has three sub-groups with different ratios. The participants were asked to provide the plural forms of a set of pictured stimuli of concrete words with two different ways for each group.
The result describes the early stages of the acquisition of the plural forms in ECA in different gender and age groups. The correct responses indicate that the Feminine Sound Plural was early acquired and the most frequently used than the Broken Plural and the Masculine Sound Plural across ages. The Masculine Sound Plural was less productive and emerged lately due to semantic restrictions. The MSP and BP were incorrect at the age of three and it was used correctly only in the oldest age. Children made fewer target responses with the frequent plural nouns than with less frequent nouns. On the one hand, overgeneralization takes place in target response analysis in which the Broken Plural forms changes towards the regular sound plurals. Concerning the Sound Plural the target responses of the suffix changes from MSP towards FSP. On the other hand, irregularization target responses of exchanging the BP for the Sound Plural or for another Broken Plural patterns, increases with age till acquiring the correct forms. The researcher has demonstrated that particular Broken Plural templates are used as early as the default Feminine Sound Plural in the child’s input. This study has given further evidence that even the irregular template forms which are very frequent in the input are most likely to be regularized in children’s grammar