Mariscal , S. 1 , Rujas, I. . 2 , Casla, M. . 2 & Aguado, J. . 3
1 Universidad Nacional de Educación a Diistancia
2 Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
3 Universidad Complutense de Madrid
The process of early grammar acquisition is still far from being understood nowadays in spite of the huge amount of empirical contributions reported during the last decade. Different kind of experimental evidence, both from comprehension and production, is needed especially to examine languages different from English.
This work presents a multi-method approach to the study of Spanish plural morphology.
1. Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm (IPLP): comprehension of verbal morphology was tested with 36 children (aged 22- 30 months). The experiment used frequent verbs and nonce verbs. Different Dependent Variables were used to test children’s performance: proportions of looking times to the matching screen vs. non-matching screen, number of head-turn to target stimuli and longest segments of looking time.
2. Imitation task: repetition of frequent and non frequent (nonce) verbs in 3rd singular and 3rd plural person was requested to a set of 55 (aged 24 – 48 months) children.
3. Grammaticality judgements: 32 children (aged 36 months to 6 years) judged sentences with and without agreement errors.
Results show clear effects of age, morphological and lexical frequency.
Taking these results together, it is possible to confirm that third plural subject agreement is mastered later than third singular, given that plural are less frequent in the input, specially for younger children compared to toddlers and adults. Moreover, children’s difficulties with these morphemes are more evident with less frequent forms and nonce verbs than with more frequent forms. The coherence of results through these various measures and levels of knowledge (implicit in IPL vs. explicit in the judgement task) reinforces the conclusion.