Word order in the input to Argentinian Spanish- learning children: How reliable as cue to clause transitivity?

AUDISIO, CYNTHIA PAMELA; QUIROGA, MACARENA SOL; RAMIREZ, MARÍA LAURA; ROSEMBERG, CELIA RENATA

Language, Interaction and Acquisition

John Benjamins Publishing Company

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2022 vol. 13 p. 93 - 124

1879-7865

Languages express events in the world by means of transitive and intransitive constructions, whose propertiesdiffer according to language typology. Children witness how specific languages express transitivity by listening to linguisticinput, which varies according to contextual variables (such as the age of the speaker and the addressee). In this study, weinvestigated word order, one feature that typically helps discriminate between transitive and intransitive constructions but ismore reliable in some languages than others. The frequency and consistency of word order as a cue towards clause transitivity wasanalysed in the input to 19 monolingual Spanish-learning children from Argentina (20 months old on average,SD = 0.3), diverse in terms of socioeconomic status (SES). We found that some word orders occur far morefrequently and/or indicate clause transitivity much more reliably than others. In addition, their consistency as transitivity cuesvaried across the registers and was crucially affected by SES.