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Early acquisition of gender agreement in the Spanish noun phrase: starting small*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2008

SONIA MARISCAL
SONIA MARISCAL*
Affiliation:
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid
*
Address for correspondence: Sonia Mariscal, Departamento de Psicología Evolutiva y de la Educación, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), C/ Juan del Rosal, 10, 28040 Madrid, Spain. e-mail: smariscal@psi.uned.es
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Abstract

Nativist and constructivist accounts differ in their characterization of children's knowledge of grammatical categories. In this paper we present research on the process of acquisition of a particular grammatical system, gender agreement in the Spanish noun phrase, in children under three years of age. The design of the longitudinal study employed presents some variations in relation to classical studies. The aim was to obtain a large corpus of NP data which would allow different types of analysis of the children's productions to be carried out. Intra-individual variability in early NP types was analyzed and measured, and an elicitation task for adjectives was used. Results show that the acquisition of NP and gender agreement is a complex process which advances as the children gradually integrate different pieces of evidence: phonological, distributional and functional. The reduction of variability as the grammatical process advances is a key feature for its explanation.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , January 2009 , pp. 143 - 171
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

[*]

This research was funded by the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (DGICYT). Project PB91-0352. Thanks to the following people for their comments to previous drafts on this paper: Susana López-Ornat, Pilar Gallo and Alexandra Karousou. Special thanks to the two anonymous reviewers of this paper, as well as to the action editor.

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