Children’s use of demonstrative words: Spatial deictics beyond infancy

Guijarro-Fuentes, Pedro, Gudde, Harmen B., Gonzalez-Pena, Patricia and Coventry, Kenny R. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2591-7723 (2024) Children’s use of demonstrative words: Spatial deictics beyond infancy. Journal of Child Language, 51 (4). pp. 952-964. ISSN 0305-0009

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Abstract

Demonstrative words are one of the most important ways of establishing reference in conversation. This work describes Spanish-speaking children’s demonstrative production between ages 2 to 10 using data from the CHILDES corpora. Results indicate that children feature all demonstratives in their lexicon – however, the distal term is scarce throughout development. Moreover, patterns of demonstrative use are not adult-like at age 10. We compare adult and child data to conclude that children’s development of demonstrative production is largely protracted. Adult use of the distal demonstrative is higher than in young children, although both older children and adults use the medial term ese more than any other demonstratives. In contrast, younger children use proximals relatively more frequently than older children and adults. Suggestions for future research and theoretical implications for the Spanish demonstrative system are discussed.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Acknowledgements. The authors would like to thank Prof. Ginny Gathercole for her helpful feedback on the first draft of the manuscript and Prof. Cristina Suárez-Gómez for her generous guidance for the corpora analysis. We are also very thankful to the Journal of Child Language Action Editor together with the two external reviewers for their very helpful and encouraging comments during the reviewing process. Any remaining errors are solely ours. This paper is part of the research project on deictic communication funded by the European Commission: Deictic Communication—A Multidisciplinary Training (DCOMM), Project Number: 676063.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	spanish,corpus linguistics,deixis,demonstratives,language development,language and linguistics,experimental and cognitive psychology,developmental and educational psychology,linguistics and language,psychology(all) ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1200/1203
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology
Related URLs:	http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	20 Mar 2023 14:53
Last Modified:	17 Dec 2024 01:37
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/91597
DOI:	10.1017/S030500092200054X

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