Text

theses

This dissertation investigates patterns of grammatical acceptability of copular verbs in obligatory contexts among Spanish monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual children. In Spanish, ser must be paired with a DP complement and estar with an adjectival passive. I question whether the two populations of speakers will demonstrate similar patterns of acceptability with the copulas, and whether or not each group’s pattern changes as the children age. I also investigate the potential effect of initial age of onset to English as a contributing factor in the bilingual speakers’ patterns of acceptability. Two experimental measures were created to empirically test these questions, a forced-choice, grammaticality judgment task (Unsworth, 2014) and a ternary-Likert acceptability judgment task (Katsos and Bishop, 2011). There were 91 participants in this dissertation study (57 Spanish monolingual speakers (4;6-10;9, M = 7;6) and 34 Spanish-English bilingual speakers (4;6-12;2, M = 8;5) with 13 adult, Spanish-dominant controls. Results from the two experimental tasks show that monolingual and bilingual children differ in their patterns of acceptability of ser and estar with obligatory predicates. From the earliest age of testing, monolingual children are shown to accept ser with DPs and estar with adjectival passives but older participants continue to demonstrate variability in their acceptability of estar + adjectival passives. Bilingual children also show high levels of acceptability of grammatical ser and estar with their complements from the earliest age of testing, with increased acceptability of ser + DP with age. Both younger and older bilingual children show similar variability with estar + adjectival passives, demonstrating a preference for overgeneralization of ser in these cases. The present research did not reveal robust findings due to the initial age of onset among the bilingual speakers. The results from the two tasks provide a baseline of data highlighting the differences in acceptability between two populations of child Spanish speakers, as well as a locus for overgeneralization of the copulas, based on their underlying linguistic structure.

ETD_8856

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Anne Lingwall Odio

doi:10.7282/T3BG2SF4

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.