Acquisition of Demonstratives in English and Spanish

González-Peña, Patricia; Doherty, Martin; Guijarro–Fuentes, Pedro

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01778

Cited by 9 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Studies of children's demonstrative production in early development have focused on infants' deictic communication including gestures and other deictic words (Rodrigo, González, de Vega, Muñetón-Ayala & Rodríguez, 2004). One recent study has described children's demonstrative use in English and Spanish (González-Peña et al, 2020). The authors analysed data from children aged 18 to 24 months from CHILDES corpora and from parental inventories.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children’s use of demonstrative words: spatial deictics beyond infancy

et al. 2022

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Demonstrative words are one of the most important ways of establishing reference in conversation. This work describes Spanish-speaking children’s demonstrative production between ages 2 to 10 using data from the CHILDES corpora. Results indicate that children feature all demonstratives in their lexicon – however, the distal term is scarce throughout development. Moreover, patterns of demonstrative use are not adult-like at age 10. We compare adult and child data to conclude that children’s development of demonstrative production is largely protracted. Adult use of the distal demonstrative is higher than in young children, although both older children and adults use the medial term ese more than any other demonstratives. In contrast, younger children use proximals relatively more frequently than older children and adults. Suggestions for future research and theoretical implications for the Spanish demonstrative system are discussed.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children’s use of demonstrative words: spatial deictics beyond infancy

et al. 2022

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“…Unlike the original procedure of De Villiers and De Villiers (1974) , the experimenter in this study used a puppet to utter testing sentences in order to avoid any non-linguistic cues, such as eye gaze. It is similar to the studies of Muşlu (2015) and González-Peña et al (2020) where they used a puppet when they uttered the testing sentences to avoid any non-linguistic cues which may help children to choose the intended object ( Figure 1 ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 79%

“…The results showed that the demonstratives did not appear with the first 50 words which children acquired in both languages. Similarly, González-Peña et al (2020) conducted a study and re-evaluated this claim. The results of the spontaneous speech transcripts and parental report data showed that demonstratives are not the most frequent of early verbal deixis.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acquisition of L2 English spatial deixes by Arabic-speaking children

Alothman

Alsager

2022

Front. Psychol.

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Deictic words are considered the earliest words which children acquire at the stage of two-word-utterance. However, mastering them like adults may take more time. This paper investigates how L2 children comprehend and produce English spatial deixis ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘this’, and ‘that’ by observing and documenting their responses and reactions in hide-and-seek game. It also aims to find out the children’s obstacles in acquiring these words, such as proximity bias and egocentrism. The subjects are Arabic children of ages four, five, and six who acquire English as a second language in international schools in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. They performed two types of tasks: comprehension task and production task. Both tasks contained two trials: same perspective and the different perspective. Based on the results, children did better in comprehending the spatial deixis than in producing them. Moreover, the results showed that there was no proximity bias happened with children in this study. In addition, the results of the two trials in both tasks illustrated that changing the deictic center improves with age. Although the study provides some significant results, there should be an increase in the number of the samples in order to make the results generalized.

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“…However, while demonstratives are often mentioned in the acquisition literature on word learning (e.g., Nelson, 1973), pointing (e.g., Rodrigo, González, de Vega, Muñetón-Ayala, & Rodríguet, 2004), and children’s use of referring terms (e.g., Hughes & Allen, 2013), there is little systematic research on this topic. What is more, the few studies that have been specifically designed to investigate the acquisition of demonstratives are often based on sparse data (i.e., few children, small corpora) and restricted to one or two European languages (e.g., Clark & Sengul, 1978; González-Peña, Doherty, & Guijarro-Fuentes, 2020). The current paper examines the emergence and development of demonstratives based on extensive corpus data of several million child words from seven languages.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, Clark (1978) argued, based on single-case diaries and some observational data, that demonstratives are generally among the first 50 words English-speaking children use and that that and there are very frequent during the one-word stage. However, several later word-learning studies, using parental questionnaires, raised doubts about Clark’s hypotheses (Caselli, Bates, Casadio, Fenson, Sanderl, & Weir, 1995; Fenson, Dale, Reznick, Bates, Thal, Pethick, Tomasello, Mervis, & Stiles, 1994; González-Peña et al, 2020). In particular, González-Peña et al (2020) argued that demonstratives appear much later than Clark and others claimed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acquisition of demonstratives in cross-linguistic perspective

Diessel

Monakhov

2022

J. Child Lang.

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This paper examines the acquisition of demonstratives (e.g., that, there) from a cross-linguistic perspective. Although demonstratives are often said to play a crucial role in L1 acquisition, there is little systematic research on this topic. Using extensive corpus data of spontaneous child speech, the paper investigates the emergence and development of demonstratives in three European (English, French, Spanish) and four non-European languages (Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Indonesian) between age 1;0 and 6;0. The data show that, across languages, demonstratives are among the earliest and most frequent child words, but their frequency decreases with age and MLU. As children grow older, they tend to use other types of referring terms (e.g., anaphoric pronouns) and other types of spatial expressions (e.g., adpositions). Considering these results, we hypothesize that children shift from using a body-oriented strategy of deictic communication to more abstract and disembodied strategies of encoding reference and space during the preschool years.

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Acquisition of Demonstratives in English and Spanish

Cited by 9 publications

References 25 publications

Children’s use of demonstrative words: spatial deictics beyond infancy

Children’s use of demonstrative words: spatial deictics beyond infancy

Acquisition of L2 English spatial deixes by Arabic-speaking children

Acquisition of demonstratives in cross-linguistic perspective

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