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The acquisition of mood selection in Spanish relative clauses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 1998

ANA TERESA PÉREZ-LEROUX
ANA TERESA PÉREZ-LEROUX
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
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Abstract

Although children acquire Spanish subjunctive morphology early in the process of language acquisition, they only master mood selection in a staged process that lasts for several years. This paper examines the possibility that the acquisition of subjunctive mood selection in particular syntactic contexts is constrained by cognitive development in the area of representational theory of mind. Acquisition of the epistemic aspects of the semantics of subjunctive are shown to be associated with the understanding of false beliefs, a landmark development in children's cognition. Twenty-two Spanish speaking children between the ages of 3;5 and 6;11 participated in an elicited production study designed to test whether children's ability to produce subjunctive relative clauses was related to their ability to pass a false belief task. Results indicate a strong correlation between children's ability to use the subjunctive mood in relative clauses and their capacity for understanding false beliefs.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , October 1998 , pp. 585 - 604
Copyright
© 1998 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Thomas Roeper, Jill deVilliers, Judith Kroll, Jorge Guitart and Lisa Reed for helpful comments and discussion of the ideas presented here. I also thank two anonymous reviewers for the JCL for their comments and suggestions. This work also benefited by discussion from audiences at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the IASCL congress at Istambul. Data collection was conducted with the support of a RGSO grant from the Pennsylvania State University. Finally, I also thank the children, teachers and parents of the Hogar Montessori de Santo Domingo, without whom this work would have been not only impossible, but unthinkable.