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Converging Evidence of Underlying Competence: Comprehension and Production in the Acquisition of Spanish Subject-Verb Agreement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 July 2021

Lisa B. HSIN Open the ORCID record for Lisa B. HSIN [Opens in a new window] ,
Nayeli GONZALEZ-GOMEZ ,
Isabelle BARRIÈRE ,
Thierry NAZZI  and
Geraldine LEGENDRE
Lisa B. HSIN*
Affiliation:
Harvard University / American Institutes for Research, USA*
Nayeli GONZALEZ-GOMEZ
Affiliation:
Oxford Brookes University, UK
Isabelle BARRIÈRE
Affiliation:
Molloy College / Yeled V'Yalda Early Childhood Center, USA
Thierry NAZZI
Affiliation:
Université Paris Descartes, France
Geraldine LEGENDRE
Affiliation:
Johns Hopkins University, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Lisa B. Hsin, 1400 Crystal Drive 11th Floor, Arlington, VA22202 Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

A surprising comprehension-production asymmetry in subject-verb (SV) agreement acquisition has been suggested in the literature, and recent research indicates that task-specific as well as language-specific features may contribute to this apparent asymmetry across languages. The present study investigates when during development children acquiring Mexican Spanish gain competence with 3rd-person SV agreement, testing production as well as comprehension in the same children aged between 3;6 and 5;7 years, and whether comprehension of SV agreement is modulated by the sentential position of the verb (i.e., medial vs. final position). Accuracy and sensitivity analyses show that comprehension performance correlates with SV agreement production abilities, and that comprehension of singular and plural third-person forms is not influenced by the sentential position of the agreement morpheme. Issues of the appropriate outcome measure and the role of structural familiarity in the development of abstract representations are discussed.

Keywords

language acquisitioncomprehension-production asymmetrySpanishsubject-verb agreementword order
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 49 , Issue 5 , September 2022 , pp. 851 - 868
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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