| Abstract: |
The present study aims to provide evidence for early subject-verb agreement in Catalanspeaking children through a picture selection task. It follows a series of studies previously developed in the field where asymmetries between production and comprehension on agreement were found (Johnson et al. , 2004; Pérez-Leroux, 2005). Results in English seemed to hint that children were not understanding subject-verb agreement by the age of four or five because English has a weak morphological system. However, results on Caribbean Spanish, which possesses a robust morphology set for agreement, branched out into a deeper issue: an asymmetry on production and comprehension of number agreement in favour of an early production. That conclusion challenges the general idea of comprehension preceding production in language acquisition. Catalan and Spanish share a robust morphology system. However, Catalan results presented in this study challenge those previously obtained. Participants on the study did not present any type of comprehension delay. Percentages on mean accuracy in pointing towards the matching pictures were very high in general. While the younger group obtained a 79% of total accuracy between singular and plural sets, the older group was accurate on an 87% of answers. These results go together with recent studies on agreement comprehension other researchers have developed through eye-tracking techniques (Brandt-Kobele and Höhle, 2010; González-Gómez et al. , 2017). Recent data seems to indicate that, in fact, asymmetries are found due to comprehension tasks being too demanding for children to perform. This study offers an explanation to these contrasts as the result of methodological problems, rather than grammatical asymmetry. Obstacles for children to focus on a certain element may hinder the emergence of linguistic knowledge on the task, especially for younger groups. Results show not only that Catalan-speaking children understand and produce agreement at early ages but also that, under simpler comprehension tasks, children offer a higher level of linguistic knowledge. |
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