Linguistic Variation in the Acquisition of Morphosyntax: Variable Object Marking in the Speech of Mexican Children and Their Caregivers

ABSTRACT

Research in language development has only recently begun to focus on the inherent variability of language. Previous studies have explored at what age children begin to produce variable linguistic forms and how these forms progress through development. While children produce adult-like variation early on, some variable forms take longer to acquire than others do. The current study builds on this previous research using naturalistic corpus data to compare variable differential object marking in the speech of Spanish-speaking children and their caregivers. While previous studies of adult speech have highlighted the variable use of the accusative object marker a, the variable distribution of the a-marker has been largely overlooked in studies of child Spanish. Our results show that preschool-age children use the same linguistic constraints as their caregivers when producing direct objects. We also found that younger children show different patterns of a-marking compared to older children and caregivers. These patterns suggest that the developmental trajectory of individual linguistic constraints depends on the distribution of variable contexts in the child’s input. Our findings highlight the importance of examining caregivers’ use of variable forms alongside children’s productions in language acquisition research.

Acknowledgments

This research was possible thanks to the National Science Foundation under Grant BCS-1061805. We offer additional thanks to Rena Torres Cacoullos and John Lipski for comments on an initial version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The Mexican Child-Caregiver Corpus contains approximately 125 hours of conversational interactions between 25 Mexican children and their caregivers. The recordings were collected from May to July 2008 by Cristina Schmitt (Michigan State University), with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF #BCS-1061805). These data are part of a larger collaborative project with Karen Miller (Penn State University), which compares acquisition of grammatical morphology in contexts of variable input.

² Our coded data and our R code for data analysis can be found at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/FP6W5.

³ A likelihood ratio comparison indicated that a model with random intercepts for both Verb and Speaker demonstrated a significantly improved fit for the data compared to a model with random intercepts for Speaker only (χ²(1) = 68.22, p < 0.001).

⁴ When the reference level for Speaker Group was changed to “Caregivers of Younger Children”, the caregivers of younger children did not differ significantly from either group of children (both ps > 0.1). However, caregivers of younger children showed a significant difference from caregivers of older children (coefficient = 1.634, p = 0.0264).

⁵ We thank a reviewer for encouraging us to consider more fundamental features that may affect DOM.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [BCS-1061805].