The Relationship between Early Lexical and Grammatical Development in Spanish: Evidence in Children with Different Linguistic Levels

Abstract

This study analyzes the relationship between lexical and grammatical development in Spanish children. The (European) Spanish version of the MacArthur-Bates CDI was used and administered to 593 Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 16 and 30-months-old. Regression analysis was applied to evaluate the relationship between age, vocabulary (total vocabulary, nouns, and verbs) and grammatical scores on two subsections of the Grammar Part. Total vocabulary explained a significantly greater proportion of variance in grammatical outcomes than age did. However, noun and verb vocabularies did not explain a greater proportion of variance in their respective morphologies than total vocabulary did. Additionally, the predictive relationship between vocabulary and grammar was found to be weaker for children whose scores were below the 10th percentile, although this could be due to the minor variability in this group and to extreme cases. We discuss the implications of these results in relation to the question of continuity between early vocabulary and grammar development in children.

Sensitivity of expressive linguistic domains to surgery age and audibility of speech in preschoolers with cochlear implants

“…They conclude: “there is little evidence either genetically or phenotypically for a dissociation between vocabulary and grammar within language”. This relationship is also found in studies of other languages (Mariscal & Gallego, 2012) and of lexically-precocious toddlers (McGregor, Sheng, & Smith, 2005). Tomblin and Zhang (2006) approached the same question by administering comprehensive language test batteries to children (longitudinally) at kindergarten, second, fourth, and eighth grades.…”

El vocabulario productivo y su relación con la gramática en niños hablantes de castellano peruano entre los 16 y los 30 meses

“…Las subsecciones seleccionadas de Gramática fueron las consideradas más sensibles para medir habilidades morfológicas y sintácticas, en línea con estudios anteriores en español (Mariscal y Gallego, 2012;Thal et al, 2000). En Combinación de palabras, se pidió a los padres ejemplos de las tres construcciones más largas producidas por el niño.…”

“…Los sustantivos fueron la clase de palabras más frecuente y que más aumentó con la edad, como en el italiano (Caselli et al, 1995;D'Odorico y Fasolo, 2007) y el español mexicano (Jackson-Maldonado et al, 1993). Además, el nivel de vocabulario predijo el nivel de desarrollo gramatical, como en el español peninsular (Mariscal y Gallego, 2012) y en el mexicano (Thal, Jackson-Maldonado y Acosta, 2000): una vez controlados los efectos de la edad y la escolarización materna, el vocabulario explicó el 20 % de la variabilidad de la LME3 y el 37 % de la variabilidad de la CM. Este estudio ofrece información sobre el desarrollo temprano del vocabulario y la gramática en el español del Perú, una etapa escasamente estudiada en esta variedad.…”

“…The CDIs are parental reports that assess language through the presentation of a series of items to the parents, mainly in the form of a checklist. We aimed to (1) describe the composition of Peruvian children's productive lexicon at this age, (2) identify whether nouns were the most frequent class in their vocabulary, and also the class which increased the most with age, as is the case in Italian (Caselli et al, 1995;D'Odorico y Fasolo, 2007) and Mexican Spanish (Jack-son-Maldonado et al, 1993); and (3) assess whether vocabulary size explained the level of grammatical development as in Peninsular and Mexican Spanish (Mariscal & Gallego, 2012;Thal, Jackson-Maldonado & Acosta, 2000).…”

Lexical, morphological and syntactic development in toddlers between 16 and 30 months old: A comparison across European Portuguese and Galician

“…For example, Szagun et al (2006) showed that the use of morphological markers starts to appear at a lexical size composed of 201-300 words and they continue to increase at higher levels of lexical capacity. Another study conducted in Spain (Mariscal & Gallego, 2012), using a sample of 593 parents who were native speakers of Spanish as informants of the toddlers' linguistic abilities, indicated that the quantity of the vocabulary accounted for a significant amount of unique variance in noun morphology. Pérez-Pereira and García-Soto (2003) also found very high correlations between lexical size and the use of regular and irregular morphology in Galician-speaking toddlers.…”