Hostname: page-component-7dd5485656-zlgnt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-30T12:42:33.394Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Acquiring constraints on morphosyntactic variation: children's Spanish subject pronoun expression

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2015

NAOMI LAPIDUS SHIN
NAOMI LAPIDUS SHIN*
Affiliation:
University of New Mexico
*
Address for correspondence: University of New Mexico – Linguistics & Spanish/Portuguese, Department of Spanish & Portuguese MSC03-2100 1, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87131, United States. e-mail: naomishin@unm.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Constraints on linguistic variation are consistent across adult speakers, yielding probabilistic and systematic patterns. Yet, little is known about the development of such patterns during childhood. This study investigates Spanish subject pronoun expression in naturalistic data from 154 monolingual children in Mexico, divided into four age groups: 6–7, 8–9, 10–11, 12+. Results from logistic regressions examining five predictors of pronoun expression in 6,481 verbs show that children's usage is structured and patterned. The study also suggests a developmental progression: as children get older, they become sensitive to more constraints. I conclude by suggesting that children learn patterns of variation by attuning to distributional tendencies in the input, and that the more frequent the patterns are, the easier they are to detect and learn.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , July 2016 , pp. 914 - 947
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

REFERENCES

Aijón Oliva, M. A., & Serrano, M. J. (2010). El hablante en su discurso: Expresión y omisión del sujeto de creo. Oralia, 13, 7–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ambridge, B., Kidd, E., Rowland, C. F., & Theakson, A. L. (2015). The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition. Journal of Child Language, 42, 239–273.Google Scholar
Ariel, M. (1990). Accessing noun phrase antecedents. Oxford: Routledge.Google Scholar
Aslin, R. & Newport, E. (2012). Statistical learning: from acquiring specific items to forming general rules. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 21, 170–176.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bel, A. (2003). The syntax of subjects in the acquisition of Spanish and Catalan. Probus, 15, 1–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Booth, J. R., & Hall, W. S. (1995). Development of the understanding of the polysemous meanings of the mental-state verb know. Cognitive Development, 10, 529–549.Google Scholar
Bybee, J. (2010). Language, usage and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Carvalho, A., Orozco, R., & Shin, N. L. (Eds.) (2015). Subject pronoun expression in Spanish: a cross-dialectal perspective. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Chevrot, J.-P., Beaud, L., & Varga, R. (2000). Developmental data on a French sociolinguistic variable: post-consonantal word-final /R/. Language Variation and Change, 12, 295–319.Google Scholar
Croft, W. (2010). The origins of grammaticalization in the verbalization of experience. Linguistics, 48, 1–48.Google Scholar
Díaz-Campos, M. (2004). Acquisition of sociolinguistic variables in Spanish: Do children acquire individual lexical forms or variable rules? In Face, T. (Ed.), Laboratory approaches to Spanish phonology (pp. 221–236). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Díaz-Campos, M. (2005). The emergence of adult-like command of sociolinguistic variables: a study of consonant weakening in Spanish-speaking children. In Eddington, D. (Ed.), Selected Proceedings of the 6th Conference on the Acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese as First and Second languages (pp. 56–65). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar
Erker, D., & Guy, G. (2012). The role of lexical frequency in syntactic variability: variable subject personal pronoun expression in Spanish. Language, 88, 526–557.Google Scholar
Gorman, K., & Johnson, D. E. (2013). Quantitative analysis. In Bayley, R., Cameron, R., & Lucas, C. (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of sociolinguistics (pp. 214–240). Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grinstead, J. (2010). Linguistic interfaces and child Spanish. In Domínguez, L. & Guijarro-Fuentes, P. (Eds.), Proceedings of the Romance Turn 3 (pp. 189–218). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
Guy, G., & Boyd, S. (1990). The development of a morphological class. Language Variation and Change, 2, 1–18.Google Scholar
Habib, R. (2014). Vowel variation and reviser acquisition in rural Syrian child and adolescent language. Language Variation and Change, 26, 45–75.Google Scholar
Hudson Kam, C. (forthcoming, 2015). The impact of conditioning variables on the acquisition of variation in adult and child learners. To appear in Language.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hughes, M., & Allen, S. (2015). The incremental effect of discourse-pragmatic sensitivity on referential choice in the acquisition of a first language. Lingua, 155, 43–61.Google Scholar
Hyams, N. (1986). Language acquisition and the theory of parameters. Dordrecht: Reidel.Google Scholar
Kiesling, S. (2011). Linguistic variation and change. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Kim, Y.-J. (2000). Subject/object drop in the acquisition of Korean: a cross-linguistic comparison. Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 9, 325–351.Google Scholar
Kovac, C., & Adamson, H. D. (1981). Variation theory and first language acquisition. In Sankoff, D. & Cedergren, H. (Eds.), Variation omnibus (pp. 403–410). Edmonton: Linguistic Research, Inc.Google Scholar
Kroch, A. (1994). Morphosyntactic variation. In Beals, K. (Ed.), Proceedings of the 30th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, Vol. 2 (pp. 180–201). Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (2001). Principles of linguistic change: social factors. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Lastra, Y., & Martín Butragueño, P. (2015). Subject pronoun expression in oral Mexican Spanish. In Carvalho, A., Orozco, R., & Shin, N. L. (Eds.), Subject pronoun expression in Spanish: a cross-dialectal perspective (pp. 39–58). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Michnowicz, J. (2015). Subject pronoun expression in contact with Maya in Yucatan Spanish. In Carvalho, A., Orozco, R., & Shin, N. L. (Eds.), Subject pronoun expression in Spanish: a cross-dialectal perspective (pp. 101–120). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Miller, K. (2013). Acquisition of variable rules: /s/-lenition in the speech of Chilean Spanish-speaking children and their caregivers. Language Variation and Change, 25, 311–340.Google Scholar
Nardy, A, Chevrot, J.-P., & Barbu, S. (2013). The acquisition of sociolinguistic variation: looking back and thinking ahead. Linguistics, 51, 255–284.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Orozco, R. (2015). Pronominal variation in Colombian Costeño Spanish. In Carvalho, A., Orozco, R., & Shin, N. L. (Eds.), Subject pronoun expression in Spanish: a cross-dialectal perspective (pp. 17–38). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Otheguy, R., & Zentella, A. C. (2012). Spanish in New York: language contact, dialectal leveling, and structural continuity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Paradis, J., & Navarro, S. (2003). Subject realization and crosslinguistic interference in the bilingual acquisition of Spanish and English: What is the role of the input? Journal of Child Language, 30, 371–393.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Posio, P. (2015). Subject pronoun usage in formulaic sequences: evidence from Peninsular Spanish. In Carvalho, A., Orozco, R., & Shin, N. L. (Eds.), Subject pronoun expression in Spanish: a cross-dialectal perspective (pp. 59–80). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
R Development Core Team. (2009). R: a language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R foundation for statistical computing. Online: <http://www.R-project.org>..>Google Scholar
Roberts, J. (1997). Acquisition of variable rules: a study of (-t, d) deletion in preschool children. Journal of Child Language, 24, 351–372.Google Scholar
Roberts, J., & Labov, W. (1995). Learning to talk Philadelphian: acquisition of short a by preschool children. Language Variation and Change, 7, 101–112.Google Scholar
Scheibman, J. (2002). Point of view and grammar: structural patterns of subjectivity in American-English conversation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Serratrice, L. (2005). The role of discourse pragmatics in the acquisition of subjects in Italian. Applied Psycholinguistics, 26, 437–462.Google Scholar
Shin, N. L. (2012). Variable use of Spanish subject pronouns by monolingual children in Mexico. In Geeslin, K. & Díaz-Campos, M. (Eds.), Selected Proceedings of the 14th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (pp. 130–141). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar
Shin, N. L. (2014). Grammatical complexification in Spanish in New York: 3sg pronoun expression and verbal ambiguity. Language Variation and Change, 26, 303–330.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shin, N. L. (forthcoming). Children's Spanish subject pronoun expression: a developmental change in tú? To appear in Sessarego, S. & Tejedo, F. (Eds.), Spanish language and sociolinguistic analysis. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Shin, N. L., & Cairns, H. (2012). The development of NP selection in school-age children: reference and Spanish subject pronouns. Language Acquisition, 19, 3–38.Google Scholar
Shin, N. L., & Erker, D. (2015). The emergence of structured variability in morphosyntax: childhood acquisition of Spanish subject pronouns. In Carvalho, A., Orozco, R., & Shin, N. L. (Eds.), Subject pronoun expression in Spanish: a cross-dialectal perspective (pp. 169–190). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Shin, N. L., & Montes-Alcalá, C. (2014). El uso contextual del pronombre sujeto como factor predictive de la influencia del inglés en el español de Nueva York. Sociolinguistic Studies, 8, 85–110.Google Scholar
Silva-Corvalán, C. (2014). Bilingual language acquisition: Spanish and English in the first six years. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, J., Durham, M., & Fortune, L. (2007). ‘Mam, my trousers is fa'in doon!’: Community, caregiver, and child in the acquisition of variation in a Scottish Dialect. Language Variation and Change, 19, 69–95.Google Scholar
Smith, J., Durham, M., & Fortune, L. (2009). Universal and dialect-specific pathways of acquisition: caregivers, children, and t/d deletion. Language Variation and Change, 21, 63–99.Google Scholar
Smith, J., Durham, M., & Richards, H. (2013). The social and linguistic in the acquisition of sociolinguistic norms: caregivers, children, and variation. Linguistics, 51, 285–324.Google Scholar
Stewart, M. (2003). ‘Pragmatic weight’ and face: pronominal presence and the case of the Spanish second person singular subject pronoun tú. Journal of Pragmatics, 35, 191–206.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, S. (2012). Variationist sociolinguistics: change, observation, interpretation. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: a usage-based approach. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Torres Cacoullos, R., & Travis, C. E. (2011). Testing convergence via code-switching: priming and the structure of variable subject expression. International Journal of Bilingualism, 15, 241–267.Google Scholar
Townsend, D. J., Ottaviano, D., & Bever, T. (1979). Immediate memory for words from main and subordinate clauses at different age levels. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 8, 83–101.Google Scholar
Travis, C. E. (2007). Genre effects on subject expression in Spanish: priming in narrative and conversation. Language Variation and Change, 19, 101–135.Google Scholar
Travis, C. E., & Torres Cacoullos, R. (2012). What do subject pronouns do in discourse? Cognitive, mechanical and constructional factors in variation. Cognitive Linguistics, 23, 711–748.Google Scholar
Valian, V. (1991). Syntactic subjects in the early speech of American and Italian children. Cognition, 40, 21–81.Google Scholar
Valian, V., & Eisenberg, Z. (1996). The development of syntactic subjects in Portuguese-speaking children. Journal of Child Language, 23, 103–128.Google Scholar
Wickham., H. (2009). ggplot2: elegant graphics for data analysis. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Yang, C. D. (2002). Knowledge and learning in natural language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Yang, C. D. (2010). Three factors in language variation. Lingua, 120, 1160–1177.Google Scholar