Exploring early syntactic generalisation: evidence from a growth curve analysis of Spanish "se" constructions

This study tested these claims on the Spanish "se" constructions (SSCs) in two children, Juan and Lucía (Aguado-Orea & Pine, 2015). Ninio's findings were replicated. Nonetheless, exploratory analyses indicated that curves are driven by the temporal distribution of tokens (instances of the SSC irrespective of verb type) and therefore may reflect non-productivity-related mechanisms, e.g., retrieval-based learning. Furthermore, hapax verbs were relatively late to emerge in the children's data, suggesting emergent generalisation. Analyses of raw lexical frequencies indicated relative semantic homogeneity across the two children's verb types, suggesting a semantic prototype. Nonetheless, ecological factors may also explain these lexical similarities.PMID:38014589 | DOI:10.1017/S0305000923000454
Source: Journal of Child Language - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Source Type: research