ERIC Number: EJ1203361
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2019
Pages: 13
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1048-9223
EISSN: N/A
Acquisition of Mood Selection in Spanish-Speaking Children
Dracos, Melisa; Requena, Pablo; Miller, Karen
Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, v26 n1 p106-118 2019
Previous research indicates that the development of mood selection in Spanish spans several years and ends in the mastery of mood selection with sentential complements to express complex semantic meanings. The present study investigates this underexplored late stage by examining how Spanish-speaking children acquire adultlike mood selection in sentential complements to factive emotive predicates involving mental state adjectives (presupposition) and the negated epistemic verb "creer" 'believe' (nonassertion). Results of an oral sentence-completion task with 66 children (4;02-10;03) and 13 adults indicate that in contrast to the early acquisition of subjunctive to express volition (with "querer" 'want'), children exhibit adultlike mood selection by ages 6-7 in the presupposition condition and ages 9-10 in the nonassertion condition. The discussion highlights not only the protracted nature of the acquisition of adultlike mood selection but also how the rate of development is context-specific as a function of semantic, syntactic, and processing complexity.
Descriptors: Spanish, Language Acquisition, Verbs, Semantics, Spanish Speaking, Phrase Structure, Form Classes (Languages), Oral Language, Child Development, Age Differences, Language Processing, Syntax, Elementary School Students, Task Analysis, Foreign Countries
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Elementary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Argentina
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A