Journal of Child Language

Table of Contents - September 2012 - Volume 39, Issue 04  

Articles

The role of morphophonological regularity in young Spanish-speaking children's production of gendered noun phrases*

BRITTANY A. LINDSEYa1 c1 and LOUANN GERKENa1

a1 University of Arizona

ABSTRACT

Adult Spanish speakers generally know which form a determiner preceding a noun should have even if the noun is not in their lexicon, because Spanish demonstrates high predictability between determiner form and noun form (la noun-a and el noun-o). We asked whether young children learning Spanish are similarly sensitive to the correlation of determiner and noun forms, or whether they initially learn determiner–noun pairings one-by-one. Spanish–English bilingual children and adults repeated Spanish words and non-words preceded by gender congruous and incongruous determiners. If children learn determiner–noun pairings one-by-one, they should show a gender congruity effect only for words. In contrast with this prediction, both children and adults demonstrated congruity effects for words and non-words, indicating sensitivity to correlated morphophonological forms. Furthermore, both age groups showed more facility in producing phrases with nouns ending in -a, which are more frequent and predictable from the preceding determiner.

(Received April 22 2010)

(Revised January 09 2011)

(Accepted June 24 2011)

(Online publication December 19 2011)

Correspondence:

c1 Address for correspondence: Brittany Lindsey, Language Development Lab, Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721-0068. e-mail: blindse2@email.arizona.edu

Footnotes

[*] This research was supported by NIH R01 HD042170 to LouAnn Gerken.