Acquisition of mood selection in Spanish-speaking children. (2nd January 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Dracos, Melisa; Requena, Pablo; Miller, Karen
• Is Part Of: Language acquisition. Volume 26:Number 1(2019)
• Page Start: 106
• Page End: 118
• Publication Date: 2019-01-02
• Subjects: Language acquisition -- Periodicals; 401.9305
• DOI: 10.1080/10489223.2018.1464006
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1048-9223

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Previous research indicates that the development of mood selection in Spanish spans several years and ends in the mastery of mood selection with sentential complements to express complex semantic meanings. The present study investigates this underexplored late stage by examining how Spanish-speaking children acquire adultlike mood selection in sentential complements to factive emotive predicates involving mental state adjectives (presupposition) and the negated epistemic verb creer 'believe' (nonassertion). Results of an oral sentence-completion task with 66 children (4;02–10;03) and 13 adults indicate that in contrast to the early acquisition of subjunctive to express volition (with querer 'want'), children exhibit adultlike mood selection by ages 6–7 in the presupposition condition and ages 9–10 in the nonassertion condition. The discussion highlights not only the protracted nature of the acquisition of adultlike mood selection but also how the rate of development is context-specific as a function of semantic, syntactic, and processing complexity.