Studies across many languages (e.g., Dutch, English, Farsi, Spanish, Xhosa) have failed to show early acquisition of subject-verb (SV) agreement, whereas recent studies on French reveal acquisition by 30months of age. Using a similar procedure as in previous French studies, the current study evaluated whether earlier comprehension of SV agreement in (Mexican) Spanish can be revealed when task demands are lowered. Two experiments using a touch-screen pointing task tested comprehension of SV agreement by monolingual Spanish-speaking children growing up in Mexico City between about 3 and 5years of age. In Experiment 1, the auditory stimuli consisted of a transitive verb+pseudonoun object (e.g., agarra el micho 'he throws the micho' vs. agarran el duco 'they throw the duco'); results failed to show early comprehension of SV agreement, replicating previous findings. In Experiment 2, the same stimuli were used, with the crucial difference that the word objeto 'object' replaced all pseudonouns; results revealed SV agreement comprehension as early as 41 to 50months. Taken together, our findings show that comprehension at this age is facilitated when task demands are lowered, here by not requiring children to process pseudowords (even when these were not critical to the task). Hence, these findings underscore the importance of task-specific/stimulus-specific features when testing early morphosyntactic development and suggest that previous results may have underestimated Spanish-speaking children's competence.
The task of writing arguments requires a linguistic and cognitive sophistication that eludes many adults, but students in the US are expected to produce written arguments starting in the fourth grade. Students from language-minority homes likewise must learn to produce such writing, despite their relatively limited experience with the English language, reflected in the availability of smaller mental lexicons and more restricted syntactic constructions. Yet some features of bilingual children's cognition, such as precocious development of theory of mind and strong metalinguistic awareness, might support the crafting of arguments in writing, where the explicit consideration of multiple points of view can serve to strengthen one's case for a claim. In this study we examine the incidence of social perspective-taking acts in the argumentative essays of language-minority and English-only students in Grades 4-6 and find that language-minority students match or surpass the English-only students on two critical measures of perspective taking (perspective acknowledgment and perspective articulation). We also explore possible connections between students' use of perspective taking in their argumentative essays and a validated formal measure of the same skill, uncovering different relationships between them in the two language groups. Connections to previously attested bilingual advantages and to the development of argumentation are discussed.
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