Learning morphology in Spanish-speaking children: study of the morpheme-meaning association / Aprendizaje de la morfología en infantes hispanohablantes: estudio de la asociación morfema-significado

Abstract

Learning the meaning of words entails also understanding the meaning of the morphemes in them. With the goal of providing evidence on the learning of new morphemes at very young ages, for this study we designed a preferential attention task with the participation of children aged 18, 24 and 30 months. During the training, they were presented with objects that had a wavy or straight cutout, with each kind of cutout associated with a pseudo-morpheme (-sa or -go) in a set of pseudo-words. In each phase of the trial, both kinds of cutouts were presented in new objects as the children listened to a new pseudo-word with one of the pseudo-morphemes in which they had been trained. The results indicated that the children were able to associate the pseudo-morpheme -go with its referent, especially at 18 and 30 months old. The possible effects of whether or not the morphemes in the task are regular are discussed; however, evidence was found in favour of the children having the ability to identify a new morpheme and associate it with its meaning, a fundamental skill in learning morphology.