Spanish-learning Children Research Articles

Word order in the input to Argentinian Spanish-learning children

Abstract Languages express events in the world by means of transitive and intransitive constructions, whose properties differ according to language typology. Children witness how specific languages express transitivity by listening to linguistic input, which varies according to contextual variables (such as the age of the speaker and the addressee). In this study, we investigated word order, one feature that typically helps discriminate between transitive and intransitive constructions but is more reliable in some languages than others. The frequency and consistency of word order as a cue towards clause transitivity was analysed in the input to 19 monolingual Spanish-learning children from Argentina (20 months old on average, SD = 0.3), diverse in terms of socioeconomic status (SES). We found that some word orders occur far more frequently and/or indicate clause transitivity much more reliably than others. In addition, their consistency as transitivity cues varied across the registers and was crucially affected by SES.

Do simple syntactic heuristics to verb meaning hold up? Testing the structure mapping account over spontaneous speech to Spanish-learning children

AbstractExperimental research has shown that English-learning children as young as 19 months, as well as children learning other languages (e.g., Mandarin), infer some aspects of verb meanings by mapping the nominal elements in the utterance onto participants in the event expressed by the verb. The present study assessed this structure or analogical mapping mechanism (SAMM) on naturalistic speech in the linguistic environment of 20 Spanish-learning infants from Argentina (average age 19 months). This study showed that the SAMM performs poorly – at chance level – especially when only noun phrases (NPs) included in experimental studies of the SAMM were parsed. If agreement morphology is considered, the performance is slightly above chance but still very poor. In addition, it was found that the SAMM performs better on intransitive and transitive verbs, compared to ditransitives. Agreement morphology has a beneficial effect only on transitive and ditransitive verbs. On the whole, concerns are raised about the role of the SAMM in infants’ interpretation of verb meaning in natural exchanges.

Nouns and verbs in the linguistic environment of Argentinian toddlers: Socioeconomic and context-related differences

This article examines the input to Argentinian Spanish-learning children from low and middle socioeconomic status (SES). It aims to determine whether the vocabulary composition (nouns and verbs) of their input varies as a function of SES, the addressee and other contextual variables such as the type of activity and the pragmatic orientation of the utterances. Thirty children (mean: 14.3 months) and their families were audio-recorded for four hours and the middle two hours were analyzed using Computerized Language Analysis (CLAN). The nouns and verbs in child-directed speech (CDS) and overheard speech (OHS) were identified using the CLAN’s part of speech tagger MOR Morphosyntactic Analysis. Regression analyses showed effects of: (a) SES and addressee on the proportion of noun types and tokens; (b) the type of activity and the pragmatic orientation of the utterances on the proportion of nouns in CDS; (c) SES and type of activity on the proportion of entity and action-oriented utterances. These findings reveal that given the complexity of children’s home environments it is crucial to consider these social and contextual dimensions to account for the distribution of different lexical categories. How they are distributed in the input likely influences the developmental course of vocabulary acquisition.

Social and linguistic cues facilitate children’s register comprehension

Speakers must command different linguistic registers to index various social-discourse elements, including the identity of the addressee. Previous work found that English-learning children could link registers to appropriate addressees by 5 years. Two experiments found that better cues to the linguistic form or to the social meaning of register could improve 3-year-old children’s ability to access their knowledge of register. Experiment 1 contrasted children acquiring English and Spanish, as Spanish provides more consistent grammatical cues to register through its pronoun system than English does. The Spanish-learning children showed earlier success in a forced-choice comprehension task. Experiment 2 provided English-learning children with enhanced cues to register’s social meaning and also found improved performance. These results suggest that the underlying knowledge about register is available from an early age, but can be accessed only with sufficiently strong cues.

Early Spanish grammatical gender bootstrapping: Learning nouns through adjectives.

Research has demonstrated that children use different strategies to infer a referent. One of these strategies is to use inflectional morphology. We present evidence that toddlers learning Spanish are capable of using gender word inflections to infer word reference. Thirty-month-olds were tested in a preferential looking experiment. Participants were shown variants of 2 unfamiliar objects; one was described as being feminine and the other as being masculine under the form of adjectives that ended either in a or o according to the most common rule of assigning gender in Spanish. Word-image associations were then assessed by presenting the 2 images together and labeling one of them with a masculine novel noun or a feminine novel noun that followed the gender contrast a/o. The data revealed that Spanish-learning children associated the novel words with the appropriate image on the basis of the morphophonological cues embedded in the previously heard adjectives. Learning grammatical gender and number may be complex in a rich morphological system such as Spanish; however, toddlers seem to benefit from the morphophonological consistency and reiteration of the system to infer novel word-object associations.

What asymmetries within comprehension reveal about asymmetries between comprehension and production: The case of verb inflection in language acquisition

Two recent studies ( Johnson et al., 2005; Perez-Leroux, 2005) found that English- and Spanish-learning children do not show the ability to use verb inflection as a cue to subject number before the age of 5 to 6 years. These findings suggest an asymmetric development as verb inflections are usually correctly produced before this age. In the present study we investigated whether German 3- to 4-year-olds take advantage of the information provided by the verb inflection in sentence comprehension. In a first study, children's looking behavior at two pictures was measured after presentation of a sentence in which the subject number was coded only by the verb inflection. The results from this study suggest that children's looks reflect correct interpretation of the sentences and thus show their ability to make use of verb inflection. In a second experiment, preferential looking was combined with an additional task in which the children had to point to the matching picture. In this case children did not perform above chance level. Our results underline the relevance that specific task demands have on the performance of children in comprehension testing. These have to be accounted for when interpreting findings on production and comprehension asymmetries in language acquisition.

Does input influence uptake? Links between maternal talk, processing speed and vocabulary size in Spanish‐learning children

It is well established that variation in caregivers' speech is associated with language outcomes, yet little is known about the learning principles that mediate these effects. This longitudinal study (n = 27) explores whether Spanish-learning children's early experiences with language predict efficiency in real-time comprehension and vocabulary learning. Measures of mothers' speech at 18 months were examined in relation to children's speech processing efficiency and reported vocabulary at 18 and 24 months. Children of mothers who provided more input at 18 months knew more words and were faster in word recognition at 24 months. Moreover, multiple regression analyses indicated that the influences of caregiver speech on speed of word recognition and vocabulary were largely overlapping. This study provides the first evidence that input shapes children's lexical processing efficiency and that vocabulary growth and increasing facility in spoken word comprehension work together to support the uptake of the information that rich input affords the young language learner.

Spoken word recognition by Latino children learning Spanish as their first language.

Research on the development of efficiency in spoken language understanding has focused largely on middle-class children learning English. Here we extend this research to Spanish-learning children (n=49; M=2;0; range= 1 ;3-3; 1) living in the USA in Latino families from primarily low socioeconomic backgrounds. Children looked at pictures of familiar objects while listening to speech naming one of the objects. Analyses of eye movements revealed developmental increases in the efficiency of speech processing. Older children and children with larger vocabularies were more efficient at processing spoken language as it unfolds in real time, as previously documented with English learners. Children whose mothers had less education tended to be slower and less accurate than children of comparable age and vocabulary size whose mothers had more schooling, consistent with previous findings of slower rates of language learning in children from disadvantaged backgrounds. These results add to the cross-linguistic literature on the development of spoken word recognition and to the study of the impact of socioeconomic status (SES) factors on early language development.

Young Children Learning Spanish Make Rapid Use of Grammatical Gender in Spoken Word Recognition

All nouns in Spanish have grammatical gender, with obligatory gender marking on preceding articles (e.g., la and el, the feminine and masculine forms of "the," respectively). Adult native speakers of languages with grammatical gender exploit this cue in on-line sentence interpretation. In a study investigating the early development of this ability, Spanish-learning children (34-42 months) were tested in an eye-tracking procedure. Presented with pairs of pictures with names of either the same grammatical gender (la pelota, "ball [feminine]"; la galleta, "cookie [feminine]") or different grammatical gender (la pelota; el zapato, "shoe [masculine]"), they heard sentences referring to one picture (Encuentra la pelota, "Find the ball"). The children were faster to orient to the referent on different-gender trials, when the article was potentially informative, than on same-gender trials, when it was not, and this ability was correlated with productive measures of lexical and grammatical competence. Spanish-learning children who can speak only 500 words already use gender-marked articles in establishing reference, a processing advantage characteristic of native Spanish-speaking adults.

How the young French child avoids the pre-voicing problem for word-initial voiced stops.

Macken & Barton (1980) noted an asymmetry in their young Spanish-learning children's word-initial stop productions, as compared with English-learning children's, namely, ‘the Spanish-learning children acquire “lead” voicing…after age four’, whereas ‘English-learning children acquire “long lag” stops…by about 2;6’. ‘One possible explanation’, they propose, ‘is that lead voicing is inherently difficult to produce or at least more difficult to learn than long lag…’. The purpose of this Note is to present data suggesting that young children learning French, which also employs phonetically pre-voiced stops for its phonemically voiced category, also show an asymmetry in their word-initial stop productions. Furthermore, this asymmetry supports the notion, proposed by Macken & Barton, that lead voicing is somehow ‘more difficult’ for these young children to learn to produce. However, the actual ‘strategy’ used by the French-learning children to circumvent this presumed difficulty is different from that used by Macken & Barton's Spanish-learning children. This difference supports the notion that children have a certain degree of latitude in finding their way through the maze of psycholinguistic development (Kiparsky & Menn 1977).

A longitudinal study of the production of contrasts in voice-onset-time by English and Spanish learning children

Sixteen infants (half from English-speaking and half from Spanish-speaking communities) were recorded between 6 and 12 months and again at 2–212 years. All utterance initial stop consonants were sorted according to place of articulation. Voice-onset-time was measured using an oscilloscope with an average measurement error of 4 ms. The two year olds were recorded imitating 10 replications of short lag or long lag and lead category stops in a CV nonsense syllable at three places of articulation. Oscillographic measurements of VOT were made of each of these imitations. Results indicate that both groups of infants had similar distributions of VOT with modal values near 0. However considerable spread into both the long lag and lead regions was noted for both groups. By 212 years of age half of the children in each group had “acquired” their native contrast. Most children collapsed the non-native contrast and produced the foreign element at near 0 VOT consistent with the infant production mode. [Work supported by NIMH.]