Priming of Prepositional Phrases and Direct Objects in Spanish-Speaking Children

Abstract

Purpose: The phenomenon of syntactic priming involves speakers repeating sentence structures they have recently experienced. Investigating priming can contribute to understanding of how children learn and generalize linguistic structures. This study examined the priming of two structures, direct object clitic pronouns and prepositional phrases, in Spanish-speaking children. Method: Participants were 22 typically developing monolingual Spanish-speaking children ages 4;2 (years;months)–6;3 who attended an early childhood education center in Central Mexico. For each structure, direct object clitic pronouns and prepositional phrases, children were randomly assigned to one of two groups. One group heard and repeated sentences that contained the target structure, and the other heard and repeated sentences without the target structure. Participants in both groups described pictures that could be appropriately described with or without the target structure after each prime sentence. Results: Results indicated that children were not more likely to produce sentences with an object after hearing and repeating a sentence with a direct object clitic. There was, however, a tendency for children to be more likely to produce sentences with prepositional phrases after hearing and repeating a sentence with a prepositional phrase. Conclusions: Results suggest that exposure to prepositional phrases can result in increased use of this structure in novel utterances. However, exposure to pronominal direct objects does not appear to increase production of direct objects, a finding that may relate to the nature of the pronominal object in Spanish. Findings inform our understanding of how typically developing Spanish-speaking children represent these grammatical structures.