Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-8mjnm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T17:57:09.269Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Early comprehension of the Spanish plural*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2014

NATALIA ARIAS-TREJO*
Affiliation:
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Facultad de Psicología
LISA M. CANTRELL
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
LINDA B. SMITH
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
ELDA A. ALVA CANTO
Affiliation:
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Facultad de Psicología
*
Address for correspondence: Natalia Arias-Trejo, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Facultad de Psicología, Av. Universidad 3004, Col. Copilco Universidad, Coyoacán, 04510, Mexico, D.F. tel: +52 55 56222287; e-mail: nariast@unam.mx

Abstract

Understanding how linguistic cues map to the environment is crucial for early language comprehension and may provide a way for bootstrapping and learning words. Research has suggested that learning how plural syntax maps to the perceptual environment may show a trajectory in which children first learn surrounding cues (verbs, modifiers) before a full mastery of the noun morpheme alone. The Spanish plural system of simple codas, dominated by one allomorph -s, and with redundant agreement markers, may facilitate early understanding of how plural linguistic cues map to novel referents. Two-year-old Mexican children correctly identified multiple novel object referents when multiple verbal cues in a phrase indicated plurality as well as in instances when the noun morphology in novel nouns was the only indicator of plurality. These results demonstrate Spanish-speaking children's ability to use plural noun inflectional morphology to infer novel word referents which may have implications for their word learning.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

The research described in this paper was supported by a CONACyT-167900 and PAPIIT- IG300313-2 research grants awarded to Natalia Arias-Trejo and by CONACyT-101752 and PAPIIT-IN306010-3 research grants to Elda Alicia Alva Canto. We thank the parents and toddlers who participated in the experiment. We are also indebted to Verónica I. Pérez Paz for her assistance in data collection.

References

REFERENCES

Bates, E. & MacWhinney, B. (1987). Competition, variation, and language learning. In MacWhinney, B. (ed.), Mechanisms of language acquisition, 157–94. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Bedore, L. & Leonard, L. (2001). Grammatical morphology deficits in Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 44, 905–24.Google Scholar
Bel, A. (1988). Teoría lingüística i adquicisió del llenguatge. Anàlisi comparada de trets morfològics en Català y Castellà. Tesis doctoral, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona.Google Scholar
Berko, J. (1958). The child's learning of English morphology. Word 14, 150–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Billman, D. & Knutson, J. (1996). Unsupervised concept learning and value systematicity: a complex whole aids learning the parts. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 22(2), 458–75.Google Scholar
Carey, S. (1978). Less may never mean more. In Campbell, R. & Smith, P. (eds), Recent advances in the psychology of language, 109–32. New York: Plenum Press.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. & Nikitina, T. V. (2009). One vs. more than one: antecedents to plural marking in early language acquisition. Linguistics 47, 103–39.Google Scholar
Cordes, S. & Brannon, E. M. (2009). Crossing the divide: infants discriminate small from large numerosities. Developmental Psychology 45(6), 1583–94.Google Scholar
de Villiers, J. G. & de Villiers, P. A. (1973). A cross sectional study of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in child speech. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 2, 267–78.Google Scholar
Ettlinger, M. & Zapf, J. (2011). The role of phonology in children's acquisition of the plural. Language Acquisition 18, 294313.Google Scholar
Feigenson, L., Carey, S. & Hauser, M. (2002). The representations underlying infants’ choice of more: object files versus analog magnitudes. Psychological Science 13, 150–3.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
File-Muriel, R .J. & Brown, E. A. (2011). The gradient nature of S-lenition in Caleño Spanish. Language Variation and Change 23(2), 223–43.Google Scholar
Grinstead, J., Cantú-Sánchez, M. & Flores-Ávalos, B. (2008). Canonical and epenthetic plural marking in Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment. Language Acquisition 15, 329–49.Google Scholar
Hammond, R. (2001). The sounds of Spanish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hellmold, N. (2008). La adquisición del plural nominal en L1 en niños hispanohablantes monolingües. Universität Hamburg: Grin.Google Scholar
Jackson-Maldonado, D., Thal, D., Marchman, V., Newton, T., Fenson, L. & Conboy, B. (2003). MacArthur inventarios del desarrollo de habilidades comunicativas. User's guide and technical manual. Baltimore: Brookes.Google Scholar
Johnson, V. E. (2005). Comprehension of third person singular /s/ in AAE-speaking children. Language, Speech, and Hearing Sciences in Schools 36(2), 116–24.Google Scholar
Jolly, H. R. & Plunkett, K. (2008). Inflectional bootstrapping in 2-year-olds. Language and Speech 51, 4559.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Justicia, F., Santiago, J., Palma, A., Huertas, D. & Gutiérrez, N. (1996). La frecuencia silábica del español escrito por niños: Estudio estadístico. Cognitiva 8, 131–68.Google Scholar
Kernan, K. & Blount, B. (1966). The acquisition of Spanish grammar by Mexican children. Anthropological Linguistics 8, 114.Google Scholar
Kirk, C. & Demuth, K. (2003). Onset/coda asymmetries in the acquisition of clusters. In Beachley, B., Brown, A. & Conlin, F. (eds), Proceedings of the 27th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 437448). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla PressGoogle Scholar
Kouider, S., Halberda, J., Wood, J. N. & Carey, S. (2006). Acquisition of English number marking: the singular–plural distinction. Language Learning and Development 2, 125.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lany, J. & Saffran, J. R. (2011). Interactions between statistical and semantic information in infant language development. Developmental Science 14(5), 1207–19.Google Scholar
Lew-Williams, C. & Fernald, A. (2007). Young children learning Spanish make rapid use of grammatical gender in spoken word recognition. Psychological Science 18(3), 193–8.Google Scholar
Lipski, J. (1999). The many faces of Spanish /s/-weakening: (re)alignment and ambisyllabicity. In Gutierrez-Rexach, J. & Martinez-Gil, F. (eds), Advances in Hispanic linguistics, 198213. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Lleó, C. (2003). Prosodic licensing of coda in the acquisition of Spanish. Probus 15, 257–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mani, N. & Plunkett, K. (2007). Phonological specificity of vowels and consonants in early lexical representations. Journal of Memory and Language 57, 252–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marchman, V. A., Plunkett, K. & Goodman, J. (1997). Overregularization in English plural and past tense inflectional morphology. Journal of Child Language 24, 767–79.Google Scholar
Marrero, V. & Aguirre, C. (2003). Plural acquisition and development in Spanish. In Montrul, S. & Ordóñez, F. (eds), Linguistic theory and language development in Hispanic languages. Papers from the 5th Linguistics Symposium and the 4th Conference on the Acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese, 275–96. Somerville: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Meints, K., Plunkett, K. & Harris, P. L. (1999). When does an ostrich become a bird? The role of typicality in early word comprehension. Developmental Psychology 35(4), 1072–8.Google Scholar
Miller, K. & Schmitt, C. (2010). Effects of variable input in the acquisition of plural in two dialects of Spanish. Lingua 120, 1178–93.Google Scholar
Miller, K. & Schmitt, C. (2012). Variable input and the acquisition of plural morphology. Language Acquisition: A Journal of Language Development 19(3), 223–61.Google Scholar
Munn, A., Miller, K. & Schmitt, C. (2006). Plurality and maximality in children's comprehension of definite noun phrases. In Bamman, D., Magnitskaia, T. & Zaller, C. (eds), BUCLD 30: Proceedings of the 30th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 365–76. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Pérez-Pereira, M. (1989). The acquisition of morphemes: some evidence from Spanish. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 3, 289312.Google Scholar
Prieto, P. & Bosch-Baliarda, M. (2006). The development of codas in Catalan. Catalan Journal of Linguistics (Acquisition of Romance Languages) 5, 237–72.Google Scholar
Schafer, G. & Plunkett, K. (1998). Rapid word learning by fifteen-month-olds under tightly controlled conditions. Child Development 69(2), 309–20.Google Scholar
Schmidt, L. B. & Willis, E. W. (2011). Systematic investigation of voicing assimilation of Spanish /s/ in Mexico City. In Alvord, S. M. (ed.), Selected Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Laboratory Approaches to Romance Phonology, 120. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar
Song, J. Y., Sundara, M. & Demuth, K. (2009). Phonological constraints on children's production of English third person singular -s. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 52, 623–42.Google Scholar
Van de Walle, G. A., Carey, S. & Prevor, M. (2000). Bases for object individuation in infancy: evidence from manual search. Journal of Cognition and Development 1, 249–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wagner, L., Swensen, L. D. & Naigles, L. R. (2009). Children's early productivity with verbal morphology. Cognitive Development 24, 223–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wood, J. N., Kouider, S. & Carey, S. (2009). Acquisition of singular–plural morphology. Developmental Psychology 45, 202–6.Google Scholar
Yoshida, H. & Smith, L. B. (2005). Linguistic cues enhance the learning of perceptual cues. Psychological Science 16, 90–5.Google Scholar
Zapf, J. A. & Smith, L. B. (2008). Meaning matters in children's plural productions. Cognition 108, 466–76.Google Scholar