Early acquisition of syntactic variation: Lexical conditioning of Spanish variable clitic placement

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dc.contributor.authorRequena, Pablo E.
dc.date.accessioned2024-02-16T16:27:21Z
dc.date.available2024-02-16T16:27:21Z
dc.date.issued2023-12-07
dc.description.abstractThis paper examines how children acquire Spanish variable clitic placement (VCP), a lexically conditioned phenomenon whereby clitics may precede or follow complex verb phrases. Research on how children acquire truly syntactic variable phenomena suggests that they either generalize one variant initially or they match the variation in the input from the beginning. Here I examine how children acquire the lexical conditioning of Spanish VCP. A corpus study of naturalistic conversations between parents and young children suggests that from the earliest ages examined (2;0-3;0) children display lexically-specific patterns that seem to be fine-tuned by the early school years. Experimental results using two different elicitation techniques with children ages 4;0-7;0 provide further support for early acquisition of the lexical conditioning of VCP and some evidence for fine-tuning during this age window. Thus, methodological triangulation enables detection of variable use where children would otherwise show categorical use of variants with infrequent syntactic phenomena, such as Spanish VCP.
dc.description.departmentModern Languages and Literatures
dc.description.sponsorshipThe work presented here was funded by Penn State University dissertation awards (STAR, RGSO, and Center for Global Studies) as well as a Language Learning Dissertation Grant.
dc.identifier.citationRequena, P. E. (2023). Early acquisition of syntactic variation: Lexical conditioning of Spanish variable clitic placement. Language Variation and Change, 1–24. doi:10.1017/S0954394523000248
dc.identifier.issn1469-8021
dc.identifier.otherhttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394523000248
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12588/5598
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisherCambridge University Press
dc.relation.ispartofseriesLanguage Variation and Change
dc.rightsAttribution 3.0 United Statesen
dc.rights.urihttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/
dc.subjectsyntactic variation
dc.subjectchild language acquisition
dc.subjectclitic
dc.subjectlexical constraint
dc.titleEarly acquisition of syntactic variation: Lexical conditioning of Spanish variable clitic placement
dc.typeArticle

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