Our focus here is on the growth of language in both typically-developing and atypically-developing Spanish-speaking children. Our studies explore the acquisition of morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics with the dual purposes of describing the course of development in our various populations of interest and discovering the patterns of organization of linguistic and non-linguistic cognition in the human mind. While some of our work has clinical implications, such as the work on specific language impairment, we try to not lose sight of our basic scientific motivation to understand cognition through the prism of Spanish language development.

OSU has much to offer in pursuit of these goals because our Hispanic Linguistics PhD program includes 9 Hispanic Linguists, among them major figures in fields of both synchronic and diachronic approaches to Hispanic morphology, phonology, phonetics, pragmatics, syntax and semantics. Further, distinguished colleagues in Linguistics, Psychology, Speech & Hearing as well as the other language departments share our interests and share in the training of our students, which makes OSU a very good place to study Spanish Psycholinguistics.

Specific Language Impairment in Spanish

Specific language impairment (SLI) is a language disorder affecting 5-7% of the general population and while much is known of how it affects children learning English as a first language, less is known about how it affects child Spanish speakers. This is a problem which needs to be remedied because the disorder takes different shapes in different grammars. In light of the fact that SLI is associated with dyslexia in school-aged children and because there is an unfortunate history in the US of tracking language minority children into special education classes, the ability to distinguish Spanish-speaking children with SLI, who actually need help, from children passing through normal processes of second language acquisition is more important than ever.

Our studies address a range of grammatical constructions, including accusative clitics, plural marking on nouns, noun-adjective agreement and finiteness marking on verbs in children in Mexico who have been diagnosed with SLI. Because SLI appears to affect linguistic cognition and spare non-linguistic cognition, our basic scientific objective is to learn something about the way that these domains of cognition interact. At the level of applied science, we hope to determine which aspects of grammar are the best candidates for being clinical markers of SLI in pre-school aged Spanish-speaking children so that diagnosis and remediation are possible before children reach school.

Syntactic Development

A long-standing question in the developmental syntax of the Southern Romance languages (Spanish, Italian & Catalan) is the question of whether children use nonfinite verbs in root contexts, as they do in child English, German, French and Dutch. This phenomenon has been called the "Optional Infinitive" Stage because children use both finite and nonfinite verbs in root contexts during this developmental period. Our work has generally shown that Spanish-speaking children do pass through this stage, but that it is not obvious in spontaneous speech as a result of the fact that most verbs (80%±) occur without an overt subject. This is important because Spanish is a language which uses "portmanteau" morphology for tense and agreement (non-segmentable morphemes to represent multiple morphological dimensions). As a consequence, it is very difficult to know if a verb is finite in the absence of an overt subject, particularly when the verb is a bare stem form, which is easy to confuse with a 3rd singular present form. Our studies use receptive tasks to try and overcome these obstacles. Both our "Grammaticality Choice" Task as well as true temporal comprehension tasks attempt to get at what Spanish-speaking children know in this domain.

A related project explores children's knowledge of subject-verb inversion, or the alternation between declarative word order Juliana pidió una pizza. and the word order associated with wh- questions ¿Qué pidió Juliana?. In this construction, we are again confronted by the obstacle to understanding posed by the null subject nature of the language, which we attempt to surmount with receptive tests.

Semantics-Pragmatics

Language has both a compositional meaning and a meaning which is enriched by context and through its plausible use. How does this enriched meaning develop? Is it part of the lexicon, part of the grammar or something else? One of our basic scientific domains of inquiry addresses the interrelated development of syntax and pragmatics. Does pragmatic knowledge bootstrap syntax or does it lag behind it? Certainly the relationship is much more complex than such a simplistic dichotomy would predict. For particular cases, however, we can ask the question more sensibly. In the case of existential determiners unos and algunos, do children develop an understanding of the syntactic/semantic representation of these terms before they develop an ability to use these representations in context? In our study, we have found relatively similar levels of mastery of the syntactic-semantic knowledge as well as the pragmatic knowledge of these terms and their use in Spanish-speaking children between 4 and 6 years of age. It is an open question whether at younger ages we may find a dissociation.