Article published in:
Hispanic Child Languages: Typical and impaired developmentEdited by John Grinstead
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 50] 2009
► pp. 117–140
Early determination
Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux | University of Toronto
Tanya Battersby | University of Toronto
This study examines the syntactic and semantic factors in children’s initial production of determiners. Using longitudinal corpora of two monolingual Spanish-speaking children, we investigate whether children exhibit sensitivity to the pre-/post-verbal asymmetry, and awareness of the count-singular, mass and count-plural distinction from an early age. Our results indicate that the children in this study have determiners from a very young age, but their initial use is not as generalized as adults’. The data suggest that the different quantitative status of the relevant input across domains and categories (lexical class, number, function and position) plays a role in development. We conclude that children attend to the categorical distinctions, rather than the overall variability in the input, in the process of acquiring the determiner system.
Published online: 22 October 2009
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.50.06per
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.50.06per
Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
Castilla-Earls, Anny, Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux & Alejandra Auza
Grinstead, John, Paij Lintz, Mariana Vega-Mendoza, Juliana De la Mora, Myriam Cantú-Sánchez & Blanca Flores-Avalos
Pérez-Leroux, Ana Teresa, Anny Patricia Castilla-Earls & Jerry Brunner
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