Frog Story retell task as a means of evaluating Spanish-speaking children’s adjective development.
Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6667-8250
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3520-3161
Document Type
Paper Presentation
Presenter Language
English
Research Area
Psycholinguistics
Location
MBSC Council Room 306
Start Date
17-10-2024 4:30 PM
End Date
17-10-2024 5:00 PM
Abstract
Previous comprehension studies (Pettibone, 2022) find that Spanish speaking children acquire lexical shift adjectives (e.g., la antigua rana ‘the former frog’/la rana antigua ‘the old frog’) prior to discourse contextual adjectives (e.g., la pequeña rana ‘the small frog [non-restrictive’]/ la rana pequeña ‘the small frog [restrictive/non-restrictive]’). Longitudinal spontaneous production studies, however, have been largely uninformative as to this pattern due to a small number of tokens. In contrast, the inherent narrative structure of the frog story retell task promotes the use of adjectives, including those that must occupy distinct syntactic positions in Spanish, providing a novel methodological opportunity to test order of acquisition of adjective types and the relative roles morphosyntax and lexical knowledge play in adjective development.
Seventy-one monolingual typically developing Spanish-speaking children in Mexico City completed a narrative retell frog stories task (M=76-months, SD=15, Range=59-101-months). Children were also given independent standardized tests of lexicon and morphosyntax. Results indicate that the total number of adjectives correlates with lexical development (r=.348, p=.005). Further, lexical, and not morphosyntactic, development correlates with the rate of Noun-Adjective order (r=.257, p=.031). Adjective-Noun order, in contrast, correlates with morphosyntactic, and not lexical, development (r=.266, p=.026). These findings fit with a Noun-Adjective-order-as-default analysis and the emergence of Adjective-Noun order requiring further acquisition of morphosyntactic constraints (e.g., only ordinal adjectives such as segundo/tercer ‘second/third’ can and did occur in Adjective-Noun order). As with previous comprehension studies, children’s narratives showed evidence of adult-like use of lexical shifts (e.g., la antigua rana ‘the former frog’/la rana antigua ‘the old frog’) however, consistent with previous findings, there were examples of non-adult-like Adjective-Noun order with discourse contextual adjectives (e.g., y después este salieron unas pequeñitas ranas ‘and after um some small frogs came out’ in a context where small is used restrictively). We take these findings to be converging evidence of the previously documented pattern using novel methodology. Further, the selective association of lexical and morphosyntactic measures with the distinct syntactic orders may provide insight into their ontogenesis.
Frog Story retell task as a means of evaluating Spanish-speaking children’s adjective development.
MBSC Council Room 306
Previous comprehension studies (Pettibone, 2022) find that Spanish speaking children acquire lexical shift adjectives (e.g., la antigua rana ‘the former frog’/la rana antigua ‘the old frog’) prior to discourse contextual adjectives (e.g., la pequeña rana ‘the small frog [non-restrictive’]/ la rana pequeña ‘the small frog [restrictive/non-restrictive]’). Longitudinal spontaneous production studies, however, have been largely uninformative as to this pattern due to a small number of tokens. In contrast, the inherent narrative structure of the frog story retell task promotes the use of adjectives, including those that must occupy distinct syntactic positions in Spanish, providing a novel methodological opportunity to test order of acquisition of adjective types and the relative roles morphosyntax and lexical knowledge play in adjective development.
Seventy-one monolingual typically developing Spanish-speaking children in Mexico City completed a narrative retell frog stories task (M=76-months, SD=15, Range=59-101-months). Children were also given independent standardized tests of lexicon and morphosyntax. Results indicate that the total number of adjectives correlates with lexical development (r=.348, p=.005). Further, lexical, and not morphosyntactic, development correlates with the rate of Noun-Adjective order (r=.257, p=.031). Adjective-Noun order, in contrast, correlates with morphosyntactic, and not lexical, development (r=.266, p=.026). These findings fit with a Noun-Adjective-order-as-default analysis and the emergence of Adjective-Noun order requiring further acquisition of morphosyntactic constraints (e.g., only ordinal adjectives such as segundo/tercer ‘second/third’ can and did occur in Adjective-Noun order). As with previous comprehension studies, children’s narratives showed evidence of adult-like use of lexical shifts (e.g., la antigua rana ‘the former frog’/la rana antigua ‘the old frog’) however, consistent with previous findings, there were examples of non-adult-like Adjective-Noun order with discourse contextual adjectives (e.g., y después este salieron unas pequeñitas ranas ‘and after um some small frogs came out’ in a context where small is used restrictively). We take these findings to be converging evidence of the previously documented pattern using novel methodology. Further, the selective association of lexical and morphosyntactic measures with the distinct syntactic orders may provide insight into their ontogenesis.