Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-k7p5g Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-14T03:00:13.696Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Learning to construct sentences in Spanish: a replication of the Weird Word Order technique

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2019

Javier AGUADO-OREA Open the ORCID record for Javier AGUADO-OREA [Opens in a new window] ,
Hannah WITHERSTONE ,
Lisa BOURGEOIS  and
Ana BASELGA
Javier AGUADO-OREA*
Affiliation:
Sheffield Hallam University, UK
Hannah WITHERSTONE
Affiliation:
Sheffield Hallam University, UK
Lisa BOURGEOIS
Affiliation:
Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain
Ana BASELGA
Affiliation:
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
*
*Corresponding author: E-mail: j.aguado-orea@shu.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In the present study, children's early ability to organise words into sentences was investigated using the Weird Word Order procedure with Spanish-speaking children. Spanish is a language that allows for more flexibility in the positions of subjects and objects, with respect to verbs, than other previously studied languages (English, French, and Japanese). As in prior studies (Abbot-Smith et al., 2001; Chang et al., 2009; Franck et al., 2011; Matthews et al., 2005, 2007), we manipulated the relative frequency of verbs in training sessions with two age groups (three- and four-year-old children). Results supported earlier findings with regard to frequency: children produced atypical word orders significantly more often with infrequent verbs than with frequent verbs. The findings from the present study support probabilistic learning models which allow higher levels of flexibility and, in turn, oppose hypotheses that defend early access to advanced grammatical knowledge.

Keywords

Weird Word OrderSpanish syntaxexperimental methods
Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 46 , Issue 6 , November 2019 , pp. 1249 - 1259
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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.)

References

Abbot-Smith, K., Chang, F., Rowland, C., Ferguson, H., & Pine, J. (2017). Do two and three year old children use an incremental first-NP-as-agent bias to process active transitive and passive sentences? A permutation analysis. Plos One, 12(10), e0186129. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0186129Google Scholar
Abbot-Smith, K., Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M. (2001). What preschool children do and do not do with ungrammatical word orders. Cognitive Development, 16, 679–92.Google Scholar
Aguado-Orea, J. (2016): Video material used for the Weird Word Order procedure in Spanish. Figshare. Online <https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.4202169> [Retrieved 3 November 2016].+[Retrieved+3+November+2016].>Google Scholar
Aguado-Orea, J., & Pine, J. M. (2015). Comparing different models of the development of verb inflection in early child Spanish. Plos One, 10(3), e0119613. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0119613Google Scholar
Aijón Oliva, M. A., & Serrano, M. J. (2012). La posición del sujeto pronominal en las cláusulas no declarativas. Onomázein, 26(2), 131–64.Google Scholar
Akhtar, N. (1999). Acquiring basic word order: evidence for data-driven learning of syntactic structure. Journal of Child Language, 26(2), 339–56.Google Scholar
Ambridge, B., Kidd, E. J., Rowland, C. F., & Theakston, A. L. (2015). The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition. Journal of Child Language, 42(2), 239–73.Google Scholar
Ambridge, B., & Lieven, E. (2011). Child language acquisition. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Braine, M. D. S. (1976). Children's first word combinations. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 41.Google Scholar
Brown, R. (1973). A first language: the early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Candan, A., Küntay, A., Yeh, Y., Cheung, H., Wagner, L., & Naigles, L. (2012). Age and language effects in children's processing of word order. Cognitive Development, 27, 205–21.Google Scholar
Chang, F., Kobayashi, T., & Amano, S. (2009). Social factors in the acquisition of a new word order. First Language, 29(4), 427–45.Google Scholar
Chater, N., & Christiansen, M. H. (2010). Language acquisition meets language evolution. Cognitive Science, 34(7), 1131–57.Google Scholar
Contreras, H. (1976). A theory of word order with special reference to Spanish. Amsterdam, & New York: North-Holland.Google Scholar
Ellis, N. C., & Ogden, D. C. (2017). Thinking about multiword constructions: usage-based approaches to acquisition and processing. Topics in Cognitive Science, 9(3), 604–20.Google Scholar
Fisher, C. (2002). Structural limits on verb mapping: the role of abstract structure in 2.5-year-olds’ interpretations of novel verbs. Developmental Science, 5, 56–65.Google Scholar
Franck, J., Millotte, S., & Lassotta, R. (2011). Early word order representations: novel arguments against old contradictions. Language Acquisition, 18(2), 121–35.Google Scholar
Freudenthal, D., Pine, J. M., Aguado-Orea, J., & Gobet, F. (2007). Modeling the developmental patterning of finiteness marking in English, Dutch, German, and Spanish using MOSAIC. Cognitive Science, 31(2), 311–41.Google Scholar
Gertner, Y., Fisher, C., & Eisengart, J. (2006). Learning words and rules: abstract knowledge of word order in early sentence comprehension. Psychological Science, 17(8), 684–91.Google Scholar
Gleitman, L. (1990). The structural sources of verb meanings. Language Acquisition, 1(1), 3–55.Google Scholar
Gleitman, L. R., Cassidy, K., Nappa, R., Papafragou, A., & Trueswell, J. C. (2005). Hard words. Language Learning and Development, 1(1), 23–64.Google Scholar
Kahane, H., & Kahane, R. (1950). The position of the actor expression in colloquial Mexican Spanish. Language, 26(2), 236–63.Google Scholar
Kail, M. (1989). Cue validity, cue cost, and processing types in sentence comprehension in French and Spanish. In MacWhinney, B. & Bates, E. (Eds.), The cross-linguistic study of sentence processing (pp. 77–117). Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kidd, E., Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M. (2006). Examining the role of lexical frequency in the acquisition and processing of sentential complements. Cognitive Development, 21(2), 93–107.Google Scholar
Lieven, E. (2010). Input and first language acquisition: evaluating the role of frequency. Lingua, 120(11), 2546–56.Google Scholar
Matthews, D., Lieven, E., Theakston, A., & Tomasello, M. (2005). The role of frequency in the acquisition of English word order. Cognitive Development, 20(1), 121–36.Google Scholar
Matthews, D., Lieven, E., Theakston, A., & Tomasello, M. (2007). French children's use and correction of weird word orders: a constructivist account. Journal of Child Language, 34(2), 381–409.Google Scholar
McClure, K., Pine, J. M., & Lieven, E. V. M. (2006). Investigating the abstractness of children's early knowledge of argument structure. Journal of Child Language, 33(4), 693–720.Google Scholar
Naigles, L. (1996). The use of multiple frames in verb learning via syntactic bootstrapping. Cognition, 58, 221–51.Google Scholar
Naigles, L., Bavin, E., & Smith, M. A. (2005). Toddlers recognize verbs in novel situations and sentences. Developmental Science. 8, 424–31.Google Scholar
Naigles, L. R., & Swensen, L. D. (2007). Syntactic supports for word learning. In E. Hoff & M. Shatz (Eds.). Blackwell handbook of language development (pp. 212–31). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Pine, J., & Lieven, E. (1997). Slot and frame patterns and the development of the determiner category. Applied Psycholinguistics, 18(2), 123–38.Google Scholar
Pine, J. M., Lieven, E. V., & Rowland, C. F. (1998). Comparing different models of the development of the English verb category. Linguistics, 36(4), 807–30.Google Scholar
Pinker, S. (1987). The bootstrapping problem in language acquisition. In MacWhinney, B. (Ed.), Mechanisms of language acquisition (pp. 399–441). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Real Academia Española (2016). CORDE Data Bank. Corpus diacrónico del español. Online <http://www.rae.es> [Retrieved 3 October 2016].+[Retrieved+3+October+2016].>Google Scholar
Serrano, M. J. (2014). Cognición y estilo comunicativo: El sujeto posverbal y el objeto sintáctico. Estudios Filológicos, 54, 139–56.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: a usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Wagner, L., Swensen, L., & Naigles, L. (2009). Children's early productivity with verbal morphology. Cognitive Development, 24, 223–39.Google Scholar
Yuan, S., Fisher, C., & Snedeker, J. (2012). Counting the nouns: simple structural cues to verb meaning. Child Development, 83(4), 1382–99.Google Scholar