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Variation in the expression of possession by Latino children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2006

Tonya E. Wolford
Tonya E. Wolford
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Abstract

As part of a national effort to improve reading levels, spontaneous speech samples were collected from 630 Latino, African American, and white children in grades 2 through 4 in Georgia, California, and Pennsylvania. In this study, data was used from 126 Latinos, and a comparison group of 28 African American and 28 white children to study their use of 3rd person possessive pronouns, periphrastic of possessives, and attributive -s possessives. It was found that Latino children confused his for her and her for his; used more periphrastic of constructions; and omitted the attributive -s marker in noun + -s + noun constructions. Multivariate analyses revealed that beyond Spanish influence, speaker sex, language origin, and grade also affected the expression of possession. Most striking are the differences according to speaker sex, and between Mexican and Puerto Rico origin children, which are considered in light of the closer relationship between Puerto Ricans and African Americans in Philadelphia.The research on which this report is based was carried out at the Linguistics Laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania, supported by NSF and the Interagency Educational Research Initiative as proposal 0115676 and the Spencer Foundation under Grant 200200074.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , March 2006 , pp. 1 - 13
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

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