The development of connectives in three to five-year-old monolingual Spanish-speaking children

Francisco J Rodríguez-Muñoz; Dimitrinka G Níkleva

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0224461

The development of connectives in three to five-year-old monolingual Spanish-speaking children

PLoS One. 2019 Oct 29;14(10):e0224461. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0224461. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Francisco J Rodríguez-Muñoz¹, Dimitrinka G Níkleva²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Education, University of Almería, Almería, Spain.
² Department of Language Education, University of Granada, Granada, Spain.

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.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Child Language*
Child, Preschool
Communication
Female
Humans
Language
Language Development*
Linguistics / methods*
Male
Spain

Grants and funding

This work was partially supported by the 2019 Own Research Plan of the University of Almería (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.