Usos de porque en el habla infantil: Implicaciones del desarrollo de la complejidad sintáctica1

Abstract

The acquisition and development of complex sentences in child language is a topic of growing interest within specialized literature for its theoretical and practical implications. In this paper, we introduce a longitudinal study focused on the emergence and functions that the Spanish connector porque presents in the talk of children aged between 2;0 and 4;0 years. This will help to understand the ontogenetic origin of causal constructions. We have analyzed the spontaneous productions of ten participants from the Koiné corpus. The results are similar to those obtained in other languages and they prove that porque is an early connector characterized by its pragmatic-discursive function and its appearance in cross-turn shared constructions. These particular features of use could be taken into account for both elaborating pedagogical materials and defining typical development profiles.

Keywords

• child language
• grammatical development
• syntactic complexity
• causal constructions