ERIC Number: EJ981879
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2012-Sep
Pages: 24
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0305-0009
EISSN: N/A
The Role of Morphophonological Regularity in Young Spanish-Speaking Children's Production of Gendered Noun Phrases
Lindsey, Brittany A.; Gerken, LouAnn
Journal of Child Language, v39 n4 p753-776 Sep 2012
Adult Spanish speakers generally know which form a determiner preceding a noun should have even if the noun is not in their lexicon, because Spanish demonstrates high predictability between determiner form and noun form ("la" noun-"a" and "el" noun-"o"). We asked whether young children learning Spanish are similarly sensitive to the correlation of determiner and noun forms, or whether they initially learn determiner-noun pairings one-by-one. Spanish-English bilingual children and adults repeated Spanish words and non-words preceded by gender congruous and incongruous determiners. If children learn determiner-noun pairings one-by-one, they should show a gender congruity effect only for words. In contrast with this prediction, both children and adults demonstrated congruity effects for words and non-words, indicating sensitivity to correlated morphophonological forms. Furthermore, both age groups showed more facility in producing phrases with nouns ending in -"a", which are more frequent and predictable from the preceding determiner.
Descriptors: Spanish Speaking, Nouns, Spanish, Role, Morphology (Languages), Phrase Structure, Form Classes (Languages), Young Children, Language Acquisition, Vocabulary, Correlation, Phonology, Prediction, Adults
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
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Language: English
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