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The use of reflexive constructions by Spanish-speaking children:Differences across functions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Raquel T. Anderson
Raquel T. Anderson*
Affiliation:
Indiana University
*
Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405. Email: raanders@indiana.edu
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Abstract

The present study sought to obtain initial data on children's use of the clitic pronoun se in Romance (e.g., Se cayó ‘He/she fell’) and regular (e.g., Se peinó ‘He/she combed himself/herself’) reflexive constructions. A total of 40 monolingual Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 2 and 4 years were given two structured tasks that assessed the contrastive use of se for coding these functions. In addition, spontaneous speech data were obtained on the children's use of this clitic pronoun. To establish expected adult-like performance on the Romance reflexive task, responses from 20 Spanish-speaking adults were obtained. The results suggest that there is a differential order of acquisition of the clitic se, whereby children initially contrast regular reflexive with nonreflexive clitic constructions and later contrast between Romance and non-Romance reflexive verb pairs. Possible reasons for this difference in use are presented as these relate to issues of lexical development and the language's marking of transitivity.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , July 1998 , pp. 489 - 512
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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