Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T03:46:50.375Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

In the wrong mood at the right time: Children’s acquisition of the Spanish subjunctive in temporal clauses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Jeannette Sánchez-Naranjo  and
Ana T. Pérez-Leroux
Jeannette Sánchez-Naranjo
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
Ana T. Pérez-Leroux
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study investigates the complexity of the mapping task in children’s acquisition of the Spanish subjunctive in temporal clauses. We consider that children’s difficulty with this task arises from the interaction between mood and other elements determining the evaluation of the temporal clause, such as semantic factors, tense, and cognition. Forty monolingual Spanish-speaking children first completed a cognitive assessment test, evaluating false belief understanding; this was followed by a linguistic prerequisite test assessing understanding of temporal connectors and knowledge of subjunctive morphology, and finally a temporal clause production task. Results reveal that mood selection in temporal clauses does not simply start with indicative followed by its replacement by subjunctive. On the contrary, the use of subjunctive temporal clauses involves a complex process for children in which tense corresponds to a fundamental source of bootstrapping. These results confirm the view that the acquisition of mood selection undergoes a protracted development. Spanish subjunctive meanings are not immediately accessible to children.

Résumé

Résumé

Cette étude examine la complexité de la tâche d’attribuer les valeurs sémantiques lors de l’acquisition par les enfants du subjonctif espagnol dans les propositions temporelles. Nous proposons que les difficultés proviennent de l’interaction entre le mode grammatical et d’autres facteurs qui déterminent l’interprétation de la subordonnée temporelle par les enfants, comme le temps, des facteurs lexico-sémantiques et le développement cognitif. Quarante enfants hispanophones monolingues ont d’abord participé à une évaluation cognitive sur la compréhension de fausses croyances. Ensuite, ils ont fait un test d’habiletés morphologiques et temporelles et, en dernier lieu, une tâche de production de subordonnées temporelles. Les résultats montrent que l’acquisition de la sélection du mode dans les subordonnées temporelles ne consiste pas à remplacer simplement l’indicatif par le subjonctif. Au contraire, l’emploi du subjonctif dans les subordonnées temporelles est le résultat d’un processus d’initialisation dans lequel le temps grammatical est un des facteurs les plus importants. Ces données confirment l’idée selon laquelle l’acquisition de la sélection du mode résulte d’un processus graduel. Les enfants n’ont pas immédiatement accès aux sens du subjonctif.

Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , July 2010 , pp. 227 - 255
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association/Association canadienne de linguistique 2010 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ahern, Aoife. 2005. El subjuntivo: significado e inferencia. Un análisis basado en la Teoría de la Relevancia. Doctoral dissertation, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Madrid.Google Scholar
Aksu-Koç, Ayhan. 1988. The acquisition of aspect and modality: The case of past reference in Turkish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Aksu-Koç, Ayhan and Alici, Didem. 2000. Understanding sources of beliefs and marking of uncertainty. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual Child Language Research Forum, ed. Clark, Eve V., 123–130. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSL1).Google Scholar
Aparici, Melina, Serrat, Elisabet, Capdevila, Montserrat, and Serra, Miquel. 2001. Acquisition of complex sentences in Spanish and Catalan speaking children. In Children’s Language 11, ed. Nelson, Keith, Aksu-Koç, Ayhan, and Johnson, Carolyn, 1–26. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Appleton, Michele and Reddy, Vasudevi. 1996. Teaching 3-year-olds to pass false belief tests: A conversational approach. Social Development 5:275–291.Google Scholar
Arregui, Ana. 2006. On the consequences of event-quantification in counterfactual conditionals. In Proceedings of the 25th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, ed. Baumer, Donald, Montero, David, and Scanlon, Michael, 67–75. Somerville: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Astington, Janet and Jenkins, Jennifer. 1999. A longitudinal study of the relation between language and ToM. Developmental Psychology 35:1311–1320.Google Scholar
Astington, Janet and Baird, Jody. 2005. Introduction. In Why language matters for theory of mind, ed. Astington, Janet and Baird, Jody 3–25. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Astington, Janet. 1993. The child’s discovery of the mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Avis, Jeremy and Harris, Paul. 1991. Belief-desire reasoning among Baka children: Evidence for a universal conception of mind. Child Development 62:460–467.Google Scholar
Baron-Cohen, Simon, Leslie, Alan, and Frith, Uta. 1985. Does the autistic child have a theory of mind? Cognition 21:37–46.Google Scholar
Blain, Eleanor and Dechaine, Rose-Marie. 2006. The evidential domain hypothesis. Paper presented at WSCLA11 (Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas), Vancouver, University of British Columbia.Google Scholar
Blake, Robert. 1980. The acquisition of mood selection among Spanish-speaking children: Ages 4 to 12. Doctoral dissertation, University of Texas, Austin.Google Scholar
Bloom, Lois, Lahey, Margaret, Hood, Lois, Lifter, Karin, and Fiess, Kathleen. 1980. Complex sentences: The acquisition of syntactic connectives and the semantic relations they encode. Journal of Child Language 7:235–262.Google Scholar
Bobaljik, Jonathan. 2006. Functional categories: Formal perspectives. Paper presented at Generative Approaches in Language Acquisition/North America (GALANA), Montreal, McGill University.Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan and Terrell, Tracy. 1974. Análisis semántico del modo en español. In Indicativo y subjuntivo, ed. Bosque, Ignacio, 145–163. Madrid: Taurus.Google Scholar
Cinque, Guglielmo. 1999. Adverbs and functional heads. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Choi, Soonjia. 1995. The development of epistemic sentence-ending modal forms and functions in Korean children. In Modality in grammar and discourse, ed. Bybee, Joan and Fleischman, Suzanne, 165–204. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 2006. Approaching UG from below. Ms., MIT.Google Scholar
Clark, Eve. 1985. The acquisition of Romance, with special reference to French. In The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition, ed. Slobin, Dan I., 687–782. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Cutting, Alexandra and Dunn, Judy. 1999. Theory of mind, emotion understanding, language and family background: Individual differences and inter-relations. Child Development 70:853–865.Google Scholar
de Villiers, Jill and de Villiers, Peter. 2000. Linguistic determinism and the understanding of false beliefs. In Children’s reasoning and the mind, ed. Mitchell, Peter and Riggs, Karen, 191–228. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
de Villiers, Jill and Pyers, Jenny. 2002. Complements to cognition: A longitudinal study of the relationship between complex syntax and false belief understanding. Cognitive Development 17:1037–1060.Google Scholar
de Villiers, Jill. 2005. Can language acquisition give children a point of view? In Why language matters for theory of mind, ed. Astington, Janet and Baird, Jody, 286–219. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Diessel, Holger. 2004. The acquisition of complex sentences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Faingold, Eduardo. 2003. The development of grammar in Spanish and the Romance languages. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.Google Scholar
García Fernández, Luis. 1999. Los complementos adverbiales temporales. In Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, ed. Bosque, Ignacio and Demonte, Violeta, 3129–3208. Madrid: Espasa Calpe.Google Scholar
Gillette, Jane, Gleitman, Henry, Gleitman, Lila, and Lederer, Anne. 1998. Human simulations of vocabulary learning. Cognition 73:135–176.Google Scholar
Givón, Talmy. 1994. Irrealis and the subjunctive. Studies in Language 18:265–337.Google Scholar
Gleitman, Lila. 1990. The structural sources of verb meanings. Language Acquisition 1:3–55.Google Scholar
Gleitman, Lila, Cassidy, Kimberly, Napa, Rebecca, Papafragou, Anna, and Trueswell, John C.. 2005. Hard words. Language Learning and Development 1:23–64.Google Scholar
Guajardo, Nicole and Watson, Anne. 2002. Narrative discourse and theory of mind development. Journal of Genetic Psychology 163:305–325.Google Scholar
Hale, Courtney Melinda and Tager-Flusberg, Helen. 2003. The influence of language on theory of mind: A training study. Developmental Science 6:346–359.Google Scholar
Happé, Francesca. 1995. The role of age and verbal ability in the ToM performance of subjects with autism. Child Development 66:98–110.Google Scholar
Hernández-Pina, Fuensanta. 1984. Teorías psicolingüísticas y su aplicación a la adquisición del español como lengua materna. Madrid: Siglo XXI.Google Scholar
Hughes, Claire and Dunn, Judy. 1997. Understanding mind and emotion: longitudinal associations with mental-state talk between young friends. Developmental Psychology 34:1026–1037.Google Scholar
Iatridou, Sabine. 2000. The grammatical ingredients of counterfactuality. Linguistic Inquiry 31:231–270.Google Scholar
Ippolito, Michela. 2002. The time of possibilities. Doctoral dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Jenkins, Jennifer and Astington, Janet. 1996. Cognitive factors and family structure associated with Theory of Mind development in young children. Developmental Psychology 32:70–78.Google Scholar
Klein, Flora. 1975. Pragmatic constraints on distribution: The Spanish subjunctive. In Papers from the Ilth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, ed. Grossman, Robin E., James San, L., and Vance, Timothy J., 353–365. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.Google Scholar
Lavandera, Beatriz. 1990. El cambio de modo como estrategia de discurso. In Indicativo y subjuntivo, ed. Bosque, Ignacio, 330–358. Madrid: Taurus.Google Scholar
Leslie, Alan. 2000. “Theory of Mind” as a mechanism of selective attention. In The new cognitive neurosciences, 2nd ed., ed. Gazzaniga, Michael S., 1235–1247. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Lohmann, Heidemarie and Tomasello, Michael. 2003. The role of language in the development of false-belief understanding: A training study. Child Development 74:1130–1144.Google Scholar
López-Ornat, Susana, Almudena Fernández, Pilar Gallo, and Sonia Mariscal. 1994. La adquisición de la lengua española. Madrid: Siglo XXI.Google Scholar
Lozano, Anthony. 1995. Cognitive development, deontic and epistemic subjunctives. Hispanic Linguistics 6/7:93–115.Google Scholar
Lunn, Patricia. 1989. Spanish mood and the prototype of assertability. Linguistics 27:687–702.Google Scholar
Mejias-Bikandi, Errapel. 1994. Assertion and speaker’s intention: A pragmatically based account of mood in Spanish. Hispania 77:892–902.Google Scholar
Naharro, Maria Antonia. 1996. La adquisición del subjuntivo español en lengua materna. In Estudios sobre la adquisición del castellano, catalán, eusquera y gallego, ed. Pérez-Pereira, Miquel, 217–229. Santiago de Compostela: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Santiago.Google Scholar
Papafragou, Anna. 1998. Modality and metarepresentation. In Proceedings of the 22nd Boston University Conference on Language Development, ed. Greenhill, Annabel, Hughes, Mary, Littlefleld, Heather, and Wash, Hugh, 610–620. Somerville: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Papafragou, Anna, Li, Peggy, Choi, Youngon and Han, Chung-hye. 2007. Evidentiality in language and cognition. Cognition 103:253–299.Google Scholar
Pascual-Melgosa, Belen. 2004. Teoría de la mente y lenguaje de referencia mental: estudio ontogenético. Doctoral dissertation, Universidad de Navarra.Google Scholar
Pérez-Leroux, Ana Teresa. 1998. The acquisition of mood selection in Spanish relative clauses. Journal of Child Language 25:585–605.Google Scholar
Pérez-Leroux, Ana Teresa. 2001. Subjunctive mood in Spanish child relatives: At the interface of linguistic and cognitive development. In Children’s Language 11, ed. Nelson, Keith, Aksu-Koç, Ayhan and Johnson, Carolyn, 69–93. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Perner, Josef, Leekam, Susan, and Wimmer, Heinz. 1987. Three-year-olds’ difficulty with false belief: The case for a conceptual deficit. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 5:125–137.Google Scholar
Perner, Josef, Zauner, Petra and Sprung, Manuel. 2005. What does “That” have to do with point of view? Conflicting desires and “Want” in German. In Why language matters for theory of mind, ed. Astington, Janet and Baird, Jody, 220–244. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Peskin, Joan and Astington, Janet. 2004. The effects of adding metacognitive language to story texts. Cognitive Development 19:253–273.Google Scholar
Quer, Josep. 1998. Mood at the interface. The Hague: Holland Academic Graphics.Google Scholar
Riggs, Kevin and Peterson, Donald. 2000. Counterfactual thinking in pre-school children: Mental state and causal inferences. In Children’s reasoning and the mind, ed. Mitchell, Peter and Riggs, Karen, 87–99. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Ruffman, Ted, Slade, Lance, and Crowe, Elena. 2002. The relation between children’s and mothers’ mental state language and theory-of-mind understanding. Child Development 73:734–751.Google Scholar
Scholl, Brian and Leslie, Alan. 1999. Modularity, development and theory of mind. Mind and Language 14:131–153.Google Scholar
Speas, Margaret. 2004a. Evidentiality, logophoricity and the pragmatic features. Lingua 114: 255–276.Google Scholar
Speas, Margaret. 2004b. Evidential paradigms, world variables and person agreement features. Italian Journal of Linguistics 16: The syntax and interpretation of person features, ed. Safir, Ken and Bianchi, Valentina, 253–280.Google Scholar
Wimmer, Henry and Perner, Josef. 1983. Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children’s understanding of deception. Cognition 13:103–128.Google Scholar
Zagona, Karen. 2002. The syntax of Spanish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar