Abstract:
This chapter explores the role that identical consonants play in the phonology of developing Hebrew speaking children. There are restrictions on the structure of roots in Semitic languages which ban underlying sequences of identical consonants, but which allow the “spreading” of a final consonant to yield a surface pair of identical consonants (or what has traditionally been termed a “long-distance geminate”). Spreading is deemed to be directional in any given language, with rightward spreading being dominant. This work seeks to explore whether the direction of spreading is a function of a learning bias and serves as a default, whether it is a learned pattern (overriding an opposite default), or whether it is learned over no preference at all.