Child Spanish Lexicon and Morphosyntax as a Predictor of Inhibition
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Date
2021-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
Recent studies of the relationship between lexical development and inhibition suggest that as the size of the lexicon increases, so does inhibitory ability. The relationship between grammar and inhibition seems somewhat more controversial. Dispaldro et al. (2013) finds a relationship between inhibition and grammar, but not in TD children. Bishop & Norbury (2005) and Ladányi & Lukács (2016) do not find significant correlations between language and inhibition. However, Kaushanskaya et al. (2017) does find an association between a composite syntax measure and inhibition, but not between inhibition and a composite lexical measure. This work distinguishing the relationships between inhibition and lexicon vs. grammar have all been carried out in English, which has relatively impoverished inflectional morphology. Because the relationships considered in the literature are hypothetically not language-particular to English, but rather claims about cognition in general, we would expect to find that they also hold in other languages, including languages with rich morphology, such as monolingual Spanish. These considerations lead us to ask: are expressive and receptive measures of lexicon associative of typically-developing monolingual child Spanish-speakers' inhibitory ability, and are expressive and receptive measures of morphosyntax associative of typically-developing monolingual child Spanish-speakers' inhibitory ability? We test a sample of 82 monolingual, typically-developing Spanish-speaking children in Mexico City, with 5 lexical measures, and 4 morphosyntax measures, as well as the Flanker Task of inhibition. Results showed that all lexical and morphosyntactic variables correlated with Flanker (p < .01), with the exception of NDW, calculated on the spontaneous production sample. Implications of these results are discussed.