Comparing different models of the development of verb inflection in early child Spanish

AGUADO OREA, Jose Javier and PINE, Julian M. (2015). Comparing different models of the development of verb inflection in early child Spanish. PLoS ONE, 10 (3), e0119613.

[img]
Preview
PDF
Aguado_Orea_Comparing_different_models_dev_verb_inflection_Spanish.pdf - Published Version
Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives.

Download (937kB) | Preview
Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0119613
Link to published version:: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0119613

Abstract

How children acquire knowledge of verb inflection is a long-standing question in language acquisition research. In the present study, we test the predictions of some current constructivist and generativist accounts of the development of verb inflection by focusing on data from two Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 2;0 and 2;6. The constructivist claim that children's early knowledge of verb inflection is only partially productive is tested by comparing the average number of different inflections per verb in matched samples of child and adult speech. The generativist claim that children's early use of verb inflection is essentially error-free is tested by investigating the rate at which the children made subjectverb agreement errors in different parts of the present tense paradigm. Our results show: 1) that, although even adults ' use of verb inflection in Spanish tends to look somewhat lexically restricted, both children's use of verb inflection was significantly less flexible than that of their caregivers, and 2) that, although the rate at which the two children produced subjectverb agreement errors in their speech was very low, this overall error rate hid a consistent pattern of error in which error rates were substantially higher in low frequency than in high frequency contexts, and substantially higher for low frequency than for high frequency verbs. These results undermine the claim that children's use of verb inflection is fully productive from the earliest observable stages, and are consistent with the constructivist claim that knowledge of verb inflection develops only gradually.

Item Type: Article
Identification Number: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0119613
Page Range: e0119613
Depositing User: Hilary Ridgway
Date Deposited: 26 Mar 2015 12:34
Last Modified: 18 Mar 2021 07:51
URI: https://shura.shu.ac.uk/id/eprint/9582

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

View more statistics