Learning to speak Spanish 'con mama': A longitudinal study of the grammatical structure and lexical composition of early noun phrases.

摘要

Acquisition research indicates that in many languages children's early speech mainly consists of noun phrases (Slobin, 1985). A noun phrase is composed of at least a noun ("people"), or a pronoun ("you"); it can also consist of a noun accompanied by adjectives and/or determiners.;This thesis investigated the lexical composition and the grammatical structure of early Spanish noun phrases, and examined how maternal input relates to these features. The interactions of four monolingual child-mother dyads, between child ages 10 and 30 months, were videotaped and transcribed. CLAN programs were used to generate both general indices and measures specific to this study (MacWhinney, 1995). Qualitative analyses were conducted to describe children's development with age and to make cross-child and cross-mother comparisons.;Three questions guided the analyses. The first question examined how the grammatical structure of Spanish noun phrases changed between child ages 10 and 30 months. Specifically, how the proportions of noun phrase types varied across age and how closed-class items emerged in children's noun phrases. The second question looked at how the lexical composition of Spanish noun phrases changed across child age, in particular, how the proportions of open-class items in children's noun phrases varied across age. The last question explored how mothers' input was related to the structure and the composition of noun phrases across child age.;Close examination of the types of noun phrases indicated that the transition from noun phrases with omitted determiners to full adult structures is a very gradual process. Most children relied on protodeterminer noun phrases as a transition to adult structure. Some children chose alternative, more semantically based routes. Closed-class elements emerged in similar patterns, but at different ages and in different proportions. Analyses of the lexical composition of noun phrases suggest that nouns were the predominant word class in most children's lexicons until age 20 months. Adjectives emerged at age 25 in only the more imitative subjects. All mothers were found to produce more speech, more nouns, and also more noun-prompts during the book task. Yet, mothers with more years of schooling produced more explicit noun-eliciting utterances.