The emergence of subjects in Lebanese two-year-olds.

In Lebanese Arabic, lexical subjects may occur before or after verbs, but only before non-verbal predicates. Analysis of spontaneous language samples from 19 two-year-old children shows that postverbal (VS) and preverbal (SV) subjects emerge simultaneously. The youngest children displayed no VS-SV difference in frequency.

A mixed-methods study of personality conceptions in the Levant: Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank.

Personality taxonomies are investigated using either etic-style studies that test whether Western-developed models fit in a new culture, or emic-style studies that derive personality dimensions from a local culture, using a psycholexical approach. Recent studies have incorporated strengths from both approaches. We combine the 2 approaches in the first study of personality descriptors in spoken Arabic.

Arab-Levantine personality structure: A psycholexical study of modern standard Arabic in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and the West Bank.

Objective: The debate of whether personality traits are universal or culture-specific has been informed by psycholexical (or lexical) studies conducted in tens of languages and cultures. We contribute to this debate through a series of studies in which we investigated personality descriptors in Modern Standard Arabic, the variety of Arabic that is presumably common to about 26 countries and native to more than 200 million people.

Method: We identified an appropriate source of personality descriptors, extracted them, and systematically reduced them to 167 personality traits that are common, are not redundant with each other, and are familiar and commonly understood in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and the West Bank (Palestinian territories).