Building a Grammatical Network: Form and Function in the Development of Hebrew Prepositions.

This study investigates the emergence and development of the prepositional category in typically developing, monolingual Hebrew-speaking children aged 2;6 to 6;0 years through analysis of 19 hours of peer-to-peer conversational data from 75 children. Using network analysis to model form-function relations of prepositions, the research reveals that with age, children's use of prepositions expands in both the number of forms and semantic functions, shifting from a one-to-one form-function mapping toward more complex, polysemous networks characterized by increased modularity and distinct semantic communities. The study identifies 22 prepositional functions—primarily grammatical (dative and accusative), spatial, and temporal—and shows that older children employ more abstract functions and exhibit greater coherence and similarity in prepositional usage. Hebrew-specific features such as prepositional inflection for gender, number, and person, and the accusative marker et, are integral to this developmental trajectory. These findings contribute to understanding lexical-grammatical category acquisition as dynamic network growth and have practical implications for language education and clinical intervention in Hebrew-speaking populations.