title: The role of morphophonological regularity in young Spanish-speaking children's production of gendered noun phrases.
abstract: Adult Spanish speakers generally know which form a determiner preceding a noun should have even if the noun is not in their lexicon, because Spanish demonstrates high predictability between determiner form and noun form (la noun-a and el noun-o). We asked whether young children learning Spanish are similarly sensitive to the correlation of determiner and noun forms, or whether they initially learn determiner-noun pairings one-by-one. Spanish-English bilingual children and adults repeated Spanish words and non-words preceded by gender congruous and incongruous determiners. If children learn determiner-noun pairings one-by-one, they should show a gender congruity effect only for words. In contrast with this prediction, both children and adults demonstrated congruity effects for words and non-words, indicating sensitivity to correlated morphophonological forms. Furthermore, both age groups showed more facility in producing phrases with nouns ending in -a, which are more frequent and predictable from the preceding determiner.
authors.affiliation: University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA. blindse2@email.arizona.edu
authors.forename: Brittany A
authors.initials: BA
authors.lastname: Lindsey
authors.forename: Louann
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Gerken
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D001245:Association Learning; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006630:Hispanic or Latino / Q000193:education / Q000523:psychology; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D010700:Phonetics; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012660:Semantics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D014706:Verbal Learning; D014825:Vocabulary