Hebrew adjectives in later language text production

The study investigates the distribution and use of adjectives in 252 texts produced by 63 Hebrew-speaking children, adolescents, and adults who were asked to tell and write a story about a personal fight or a quarrel, and to present a talk and write an expository text on the topic of school violence. All adjective types and tokens in each text were identified, counted, classified, and analyzed using semantic, morphological, and syntactic criteria. Findings show that the adjective class grows larger, richer, and more diverse with age and schooling - in lexicon, morpho-semantics, and syntax. Also, adjectives configure by text genres and modalities in ways that provide independent support for text type classification from spoken narratives, on the one hand, to written expositories, on the other. Finally, gender effects point in the direction of Hebrew-speaking girls and women employing a richer and more diverse adjective lexicon than boys and men in this study.