A Portrait of Lexical Knowledge among Adult Hebrew Heritage Speakers Dominant in American English: Evidence from Naming and Narrative Tasks
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
I have some specific and some general queries detailed in what follows.
Introduction
· There is no reference to Hebrew typology in the introduction but in in the discussion the authors refer to that. I recommend adding a subsection on Hebrew typology.
· One of the motivations of this study is to tease apart universal versus specific language interfaces but these universal / language specific interfaces are not detailed for other languages as well.
· The subsection on “Hebrew speakers in the United States” is redundant since it fits more a sociological paper but this paper is not sociological. It is better to dedicate a chapter to typology and on the influence of typological differences on language heritage speakers.
Method
I have some queries concerning specific items selected and the classification method.
· Are mefteax – man’ul -antonyms? This relation is associative.
· The category “Cohyponym” was assigned to “associative” responses but co-hyponym is a semantic type of relation. Associative relations are related in time and place whereas co-hyponyms are members of the same category. There are studies on this differentiation between semantic and associative responses. Please read them and revise your categorization.
· The specific item nura – is a high register word, most of Hebrew speakers say “menora” . I would not consider saying menorah as an error.
· The specfiic word richrach – is a low register word. Why was not the word roxsan used? I don’t understand why menora is wrong and richrach is right
· Explanation is categorized as a semantic response but maybe it deserves another category? Explanation is beyond the scope of the lexicon.
Results
· There is a big range of results in the Hebrew MINT. Maybe calculation of mean is not reflecting this variability and its better to employ a median?
· Table 2 – what does it describe? What are the percentages of all these? Are these code-switching responses? They were very few so why is it so detailed?
· What is the category “cultural”? This is a type of explanation. Why did this explanation deserve a new category and was not included in the explanations?
· The category “phonological responses” includes morphological responses as well. Why is it termed only “phonolology”?
· Aviron instead of matos is not an error in my opinion and I would not classify it as child-like
Discussion
· In my opinion it is premature to write about universals in the lexicon based only on results from Russian. What about the other studies cited in the introduction? Why didn’t the authors compare their results to these of the present study?
· The authors do not try to explain the correlations that appeared only between the MINT results and code-switching but not with calques.
· The discussion as a whole is very descriptive. What are the implications of these results? How does this study contribute to our understanding of multilingualism except for adding another language to the language list?
References
· Fridman & Meir – not cited
· Not all the names of journals and books are in italics.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
This contribution enriches HL studies and provides valuable information about vocabulary production in a HL that, as far as I am aware, had not been studied in contact with English. There are some very minor details that authors may want to consider, to wit:
--on pp. 2-3, it seems that "ie" is really "e.g."
--p. 3, line 126, delete comma after Hebrew
--p. 4, line 183, is the first time that TTR appears in the text. The spelled out version of the acronym doesn't appear until p. 7. I suggest spelling it out on p. 4.
--APA suggests that numerals be spelled out (e.g., "Forty Hebrew HSs...") when they start a sentence. Authors are encouraged to revise that aspect in the whole text.
--Top of page 7, title of subsection: Narrative is missing "e"
--On p. 7, words in Hebrew are not italicized, but they are in other parts of the text. I suggest italicizing words in Hebrew.
--p. 7, title of subsection 3. 1 has an extra period before Quantitative.
--p. 9, line 275, delete period after Figure 2.
--p. 9, lines 277-278, consider replacing "more than" in "more than 4 [5] times" with "over" to avoid "more than 4 times more than..." (or a different way of getting around that repetition).
--p. 10, line 293, "borrowing" without capital B ???
--the examples on pp. 14-15 are misnumbered.
--on p. 15, I suggest renumbering examples 1-7 to start at 7, i.e., continuing from example 6, as is normal in linguistics (the text that follows would have to be changed accordingly, naturally).
--p. 16, line 487. I'm not a native speaker of English, but I don't know the expression "To meet this end". Perhaps simply "to this end"??
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
I have no further comments.
