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Knowledge Of Adjective Reference By Monolingual Spanish-And English- Speaking Children, Martha Elizabeth Rayas Tanaka

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Previous studies (Waxman and Kosowski 1990, Waxman, Senghas and Benveniste, 1997 and Waxman and Guasti, 2009) have concluded that there is a distinct inclination for Spanish-speaking monolingual children but not for English-speaking children (3 and 4 years of age) to "extend" a novel adjective that is applied to an individual object, to other members of the same superordinate level category due to the Determiner-Adjective construction in Spanish, in which a postnominal adjective occurs in the same surface position as a noun such as in: La azul `the blue (one)'. In an Across-Category condition, children were presented with a model object …