Eugenia Sebastián

The early acquisition of Spanish verbal morphology: Across-the-board or piecemeal knowledge?

This paper examines the earliest uses of verbal morphology in aninflectional language, Spanish . Stringent criteria are applied to data from two children to determine what inflections are used productively. Analyses reveal that there is little productive command of verbal morphology at early ages and that subjects begin with a single form per verb. When elements of the verb paradigm do begin to become productive, they do so in a very gradual, piecemeal fashion. Finally, what governs which aspects of the paradigm are learned early seems to be a complex interaction of the input with cognitive and linguistic complexity.

The Emergence of Linguistic Person in Spanish-Speaking Children.

Data from 3 children (2 male, 1 female) acquiring Spanish are explored for the development of linguistic person in an inflectional language. Contrastive use of person, tense, and number and the presence of overt subjects and overt objects are examined. Recent claims that person emerges before tense and number and that the latter license overt subjects are not supported. Each of the 3 children follows a different route in the development of person, tense, and number. The data challenge any theory positing uniformity across children, proposing a maturational sequence of innately endowed categories for person, tense, and number, or claiming that Universal Grammar links the emergence of any of these with the presence of overt subjects.

The development of vocabulary in Spanish children with Down syndrome: Comprehension, production, and gestures

Abstract Background Our main purpose was to compare the lexical development of Spanish children with Down syndrome (DS) and children with typical development (TD) to investigate the relationship between cognitive and vocabulary development in comprehension and oral and gestural production. Method Participants were 186 children with DS and 186 children with TD, with a mental age (MA) of 8–29 months and matched on gender and MA. Information about vocabulary was obtained using a new Spanish adaptation of the MacArthur–Bates CDI for children with DS. Results No significant differences in oral production were found. Lexical comprehension and gestural production of children with DS were superior. Similar to children with TD, gestural production in children with DS decreased as oral production increased. Conclusion Our study provides evidence to support that lexical comprehension and gesture production are strengths in children with DS. With respect to oral production, our results do not support a specific dissociation between cognitive and lexical development.

Early grammatical development in Spanish children with Down syndrome.

The objective of this work was to analyze morphosyntactic development in a wide sample of children with Down syndrome (DS) (n = 92) and children with typical development (TD) (n = 92) with a mental age (MA) of 20 to 29 months. Children were individually matched for gender and MA (Analysis 1) and for vocabulary size (Analysis 2). Information about morphosyntax was obtained using an adaptation of the CDI for children with DS. In both analyses, the number of children with DS and with TD who combined words was similar. Analysis 1 showed that children with DS produced shorter utterances, with less morphosyntactic complexity and less morphological suffixes than children with TD, despite having the same mental age. The developmental pattern was similar, although slower in children with DS. Analysis 2 showed that the performance of children with DS was lower than the performance of children with TD in relation to morphosyntactic complexity and morphological suffixes.

La adquisición del vocabulario en niños con síndrome de Down: datos normativos y tendencias de desarrollo

Resumen El objetivo del presente trabajo es ofrecer los primeros datos normativos en español sobre el desarrollo del vocabulario, tanto en comprensión, como en producción oral y gestual, en niños con síndrome de Down (SD). Participaron 230 niños con SD de entre 8 y 29 meses de edad mental divididos en 11 grupos. Para medir el vocabulario se empleó el Inventario de Desarrollo Comunicativo MacArthur-Bates (CDI) adaptado al perfil evolutivo de los niños con SD. La comprensión del vocabulario fue superior a la producción oral. En ambos casos, se apreció un aumento progresivo, más gradual en la comprensión y más pronunciado en la producción oral. La tendencia encontrada en la producción gestual era diferente. Al principio, los gestos van aumentando lentamente, a partir de la edad de 20–21 meses se mantienen en un nivel similar y en los últimos grupos de edad comienzan a disminuir. Este descenso parece ir asociado al aumento de la producción oral. Se discute la relevancia de los datos normativos ofrecidos para la investigación, la evaluación y la intervención.

Lexically Specified Patterns in Early Verbal Morphology in Spanish

Since the 1960’s, when serious investigation of child language acquisition was spurred on by both the Chomskyan revolution and the work carried out by Roger Brown and his colleagues, one issue that has been investigated extensively has been early grammatical development. This area of development has been of continual interest and investigation because it presents many of the most intractable issues surrounding language acquisition. These issues include the question of the timing and order of development across items and what controls this order; the determination of what constitutes evidence of a productive command on the part of the child; the question of the scope of the child’s categories and rules; and the nature of children’s errors and what they may reveal about the child’s knowledge. All of these issues are, of course, intimately related. Recent research in this area has suggested that, for English-speaking children at least, the earliest steps to grammatical development consist of acquiring piecemeal knowledge, and that children’s productive command of the language is restricted to limited-scope, lexically specified patterns or rules. Children learning inflectional languages, in contrast, are often reported to achieve a productive command of morphological paradigms earlier than English-speaking children, even as early as two years of age. This investigation seeks to contribute to the question of children’s early grammatical knowledge by examining the early use of verb forms in Spanish-speaking children.

La reflexión metalingüística: algunas cuestiones teóricas y aplicadas

En este articulo se revisan algunas cuestiones teoricas y aplicadas del desarrollo de las capacidades metalinguisticas. Se presenta el modelo RR de Karmiloff-Smith como solucion teorica a un debate...

Negative commands in Spanish-speaking children: no need for recourse to relativized minimality (a reply to Grinstead, 2000).

In a recent commentary, Grinstead (2000) argues against Bates & Goodmans (1999) claims that the development of grammar is contingent on developments in the lexicon, and that, therefore, there is no need for an independent grammar domain. Citing data on the acquisition of negative commands in Catalan and Spanish, Grinstead argues that beyond grammatical elements that are linked with lexical items, there must also exist independently a computational component, which includes grammatical constraints. He argues further that these constraints are observed from the beginning of acquisition. The purpose of this note is, first, to challenge the evidence Grinstead brings to bear in support of this position and, second, to argue further that the acquisition of negative commands in Spanish is better understood in terms of item-based learning combined with low functional load.

Adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories for Spanish Children With Down Syndrome: Validity and Reliability Data for Vocabulary

PURPOSE The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories are widely used to study early language and communicative development. We recently developed a Spanish version for children with Down syndrome (the CDI-Down) adapted to their particular profile of linguistic and communicative development. The principal aims of this study are to assess the concurrent validity and test-retest reliability of the vocabulary section of this adaptation. METHOD Validation for productive vocabulary (Study 1) was achieved by correlating CDI-Down scores on expressive vocabulary and measures on the basis of spontaneous speech samples (n = 29). Validation for receptive vocabulary (Study 2) was achieved by correlating CDI-Down scores on receptive vocabulary and measures derived from language items of the Brunet-Lézine Scale (Josse, 1997; n = 70). Reliability (Study 3) was measured with a subset of parents who completed the same inventory 4 months after the original sampling (n = 26). RESULTS CDI-Down expressive and receptive vocabulary scores showed a significant positive relationship with their comparison measures, thereby demonstrating convergent validity. A significant positive relationship was also found between test-retest measures for productive and receptive vocabularies, thus supporting the reliability of the adaptation. CONCLUSION The results demonstrate that the CDI-Down is a valid and reliable tool that could be useful for parents, teachers, clinicians, and researchers.

‘La ronda’ como evento para la constitución social del grupo en una clase de educación infantil

Resumen Este artículo presenta un análisis de corte microetnográfico de un evento de habla conocido como la ronda, recurrente en muchas clases de educación infantil y primaria, en el que los niños y las niñas presentan al resto de la clase narraciones de experiencia personal. El estudio se realizó en un aula de educación infantil de cinco años en una escuela pública de Madrid y el evento seleccionado fue documentado a lo largo de todo un curso escolar. El análisis defiende que este acontecimiento comunicativo contribuye a que el grupo clase se constituya en una comunidad moral (Shweder, 1996), proceso que se ve reflejado en el modo en que se manejan temas afectivamente cargados, las normas de vida fuera del aula, la historia compartida de la clase o los derechos y deberes que rigen la interacción social durante este episodio.