Elda Alicia Alva Canto

Early comprehension of the Spanish plural.

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 childrens ability to use plural noun inflectional morphology to infer novel word referents which may have implications for their word learning.

Processing Speed of Infants with High and Low Communicative Skills

Background and rationale. While experimental psychology has focused on the study of processes that determine the individual’s behaviour in specific experimental situations, the studies concerning individual differences have analyzed the stability of observed differences on performance between individuals, in particular those which can be generalized through diverse situations or tasks (Williams et al., J Exp Anal Behav 90:219–231, 2008). Several studies have shown that processing speed is a useful variable to study how age and ability in a specific task affect the performance in more general cognitive tasks such as language (Zheng et al., Psyc Bulletin & Rev 7:113–120, 2000). In studies with infants for example, it is known that younger children are slower to process linguistic stimuli compared with older children while they respond to the same task (Fernald et al. 1998); and that there is a positive relation between vocabulary development and processing speed during the second year of life (Fernald et al., Child Dev 72(4):1003–1015, 2001; Fernald et al., Dev Psychol 42(1):98–116, 2006; Zangl et al., J Cogn Dev 6(2):179–208, 2005).

Velocidad de Procesamiento como Indicador de Vocabulario en el Segundo Año de Vida

Resumen El proposito del presente estudio fue determinar si la velocidad de procesamiento, medida como tiempo de reaccion (TR), de infantes antes del primer ano de edad obtenida en una tarea de aprendizaje de palabras, puede ser un indicador del desempeno de los mismos en medidas de habilidades comunicativas durante el segundo ano de vida. Para ello, se obtuvo el TR de infantes de 10 meses de edad en una tarea de aprendizaje de palabras y se relaciono con las habilidades comunicativas de los mismos infantes obtenidos en el Inventario de Habilidades Comunicativas MacArthur Version II (CDI-II) 18 meses despues. Se realizo un analisis de regresion lineal utilizando el TR en la tarea experimental como predictor y el puntaje de vocabulario obtenido como variable dependiente. Se encontro que el TR medido a los 10 meses de edad puede usarse como predictor del desempeno en la medida de vocabulario en los mismos infantes un ano y medio despues. Los resultados obtenidos en este trabajo resaltan la importancia del estudio del TR en edades tempranas y sus efectos sobre el proceso de aprendizaje de palabras.