The development of connectives in three to five-year-old monolingual Spanish-speaking children
Identificadores
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10481/62403Metadata
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Nicholas Greatorex Riches, Newcastle University Institute for Health and Society, UNITED KINGDOM
Date
2019-10Referencia bibliográfica
Rodríguez-Muñoz FJ, Níkleva DG (2019) The development of connectives in three to fiveyear-old monolingual Spanish-speaking children. PLoS ONE 14(10): e0224461. https://doi.org/ 10.1371/journal.pone.0224461
Sponsorship
This work was partially supported by the 2019 Own Research Plan of the University of Almerı´a (https://www.ual.es) to FJRM. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Abstract
Little attention has been paid to the expansion in the use of connectives in children that are
acquiring Spanish as a first language. Considering that language structure emerges from
language use, naturalistic data were utilised from two conversational corpora. 12 types of
connectives showed significant expansion, with the conditional conjunction si ‘if’ presenting
the greatest advance, followed by que ‘that’ used as relative pronoun with explicit antecedent and as completive conjunction. We observed that the interordination and subordination
relationships progressed more than those of coordination; however, certain connective elements between coordinated constructions displayed a more notable expansion as discourse
markers, in the interactional level.