ABSTRACT

Previous research indicates that the development of mood selection in Spanish spans several years and ends in the mastery of mood selection with sentential complements to express complex semantic meanings. The present study investigates this underexplored late stage by examining how Spanish-speaking children acquire adultlike mood selection in sentential complements to factive emotive predicates involving mental state adjectives (presupposition) and the negated epistemic verb creer ‘believe’ (nonassertion). Results of an oral sentence-completion task with 66 children (4;02–10;03) and 13 adults indicate that in contrast to the early acquisition of subjunctive to express volition (with querer ‘want’), children exhibit adultlike mood selection by ages 6–7 in the presupposition condition and ages 9–10 in the nonassertion condition. The discussion highlights not only the protracted nature of the acquisition of adultlike mood selection but also how the rate of development is context-specific as a function of semantic, syntactic, and processing complexity.

摘要

先前的研究表明，西班牙语中的情绪选择的发展跨越了数年，并以掌握用句法补语表达复杂语义的情绪选择而告终。本研究通过研究讲西班牙语的儿童如何以情感状态谓语（预设）和否定的认知动词creer'believe（否定）的事实情感谓语的句子补语来获得成年成人的情绪选择，从而调查了这个尚未被开发的后期阶段。有66名儿童（4; 02–10; 03）和13名成人的口头完成句子任务的结果表明，与尽早使用虚拟语气表达意志（使用酷儿）相反“想要”），儿童在预设条件下的成人情绪选择为6–7岁，在非主张状态下的孩子为9–10岁。讨论不仅强调了获取成人风格的情绪选择的旷日持久的性质，而且强调了发展速度如何根据上下文，语义，句法和处理复杂性而变化。