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

Abstract

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.

Variation in first-generation L1 deictic systems: Language attrition and bilingualism effects

“…The current results thus suggest that deictic referential use may change under pressure from bilingual language exposure, and as a result of bilingualism itself, whereby bilingual competence may act as a catalyst. Interestingly, this change appears to observe universal trends of simplification (Seliger & Vago, 1991) and is consistent with both viable and observable trends in the specific language itself, as documented in the corpora data from Guijarro-Fuentes and González-Peña (submitted) and the experimental study by Todisco, Guijarro-Fuentes and Coventry (2021). Thus, the target group participants’ simplified demonstrative system is in line with an ongoing process of reduction of deictic terms in Modern Spanish.…”

“…We searched for independent evidence of the use of deictic terms in Modern Spanish beyond the context of the current controlled experiment. Indeed, there is emerging evidence that the use of aquel in Modern Spanish is highly context-dependent and infrequent in corpora of the language (Guijarro-Fuentes & González-Peña, submitted), a finding consistent with the results of the SLiN group. Given this evidence, an alternative account of the SLiN results would be that the observed pattern of performance reflects the bilingual status of participants and is thus driven by what Schmid (2019) labels ‘the range of linguistic skills available to the individual’.…”

Demonstratives in Spanish–Catalan simultaneous bilinguals: which system do they prefer?

“…According to Hottenroth (1982), the speaker is the only deictic centre (or ORIGO, Bühler, 1934). The ad/pronominal form este (this), thus, identifies a space proximal to the speaker; ese (that) a medial distance from the speaker (with no reference to the hearer) and aquel (that) a space far from the speaker, with recent evidence suggesting that the distal term (aquel, that) is used less frequently than the proximal and medial terms in both adult and child speech (Guijarro-Fuentes et al, 2022a). Given the ongoing debate on whether or not the position of hearer affects the speaker's choice of one demonstrative form on another, other studies have studied the relative positions of speaker and hearer during interaction, with somewhat mixed results (Coventry et al, 2008;Gómez Sánchez & Jungbluth, 2015;Jungbluth, 2003Jungbluth, , 2005Rubio-Fernandez, 2022;Shin et al, 2020;Woensdregt et al, 2022).…”