Her studies under the British linguists Firth and Halliday led to her participation in a large-scale research project on the teaching of English as a foreign language in Israel, supervised by Prof. Gina Ortar, at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

In 1965, she began her decades-long career at Tel Aviv University, which included coordinating the compilation of the “English for Speakers of Hebrew” series of textbooks based on the principles of Hebrew-English Contrastive Linguistics.

Her doctoral dissertation (1973) investigated a range of verbal nouns in Modern Hebrew in the framework of current transformational syntactic theory.

Her studies included examination of the development of grammar and lexicon by native Hebrew-speaking toddlers, preschoolers, and schoolchildren – research that bore fruit in a monograph on acquisition of Hebrew as part of a major cross-linguistic series (1985).

Against this background, Berman subsequently participated actively in cross-linguistic projects comparing children’s acquisition of various aspects of Hebrew with their counterparts acquiring different languages.

This latter project constituted a driving force in the contemporary study of acquisition of narrative abilities as a branch of psycholinguistic research.It also formed the basis for a large-scale research project, funded by the Spencer Foundation, Chicago, with Berman as Principal Investigator, comparing the abilities of grade-school, middle-school, and high-school students – speakers of seven different native languages – in construction of narrative and expository texts in speech and writing.