Hebrew derived nouns in context: a developmental perspective.
Derived nouns constitute a productive group of abstract nouns in Hebrew, consisting of action nominals as well as other verb-related nouns in other morphological patterns. This study traces the route taken by Hebrew-speaking children, adolescents and adults on a written sentence-construction test. The test consisted of six pairs of derived nouns sharing the same root but having different meanings (analogous to English pairs like process-procedure, destiny-destination) and was administered to 110 native speakers of Hebrew (school-goers in grades VI, VIII, and XI and two groups of adults, younger and older). Results of both quantitative and qualitative analyses point to the influence of various semantic factors on later lexical development on the one hand, and a close semantic-syntactic interdependency, on the other.