La Influencia del Número de Objetos y las Claves Verbales en la Distinción Temprana del Plural

Abstract

Language allows exploring the world and expressing knowledge about it. In the case of grammatical number, the ability to associate verbal cues of singular and plural allows children to infer meaning, discriminate, anticipate and track referents. Early comprehension of plural is dependent on the verbal cues provided; and production, on the number of items in a set. Nevertheless, it remains unknown the relationship that both factors play in the early comprehension of the plural in a morphologically rich language such as Spanish. Therefore, the objective of the current research was to explore whether the number of verbal cues influences the ability of 2-year-old Spanish speakers to verbally distinguish plural in a small set of objects (2 versus 1) from singular. Two experiments were performed by means of the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm to evaluate whether the children associated multiple verbal cues (E1) as well as nounendings (E2) indicative of plural to a set of two objects. Children associated the multiple cues of plurality, but not the nounendings, to the set of two objects. These results suggest a certain degree of difficulty in the early comprehension of plural, when a set is formed by two objects; nonetheless, they also confirm children’s early ability to extract information from syntactic enriched frames.