El estudio de la sintaxis infantil a partir del diálogo con niños: Aportes metodológicos / The study of children syntax from child-adult dialogues: Methodological contributions

RESUMEN

En el estudio del desarrollo sintáctico infantil se plantea con frecuencia que trabajar con muestras espontáneas, es decir instancias dialogales cotidianas entre niños o entre niños y adultos, resulta problemático pues es necesario contar con un volumen considerable de habla infantil para poder recoger las formas sintácticas en estudio y realizar con ellas un análisis estadístico (Demuth, 1996). Además se alega que los datos obtenidos resultan espurios pues en los contextos espontáneos es difícil controlar la injerencia de variables contextuales (Echeverría, 1978). No obstante se ha considerado que estas muestras ofrecen datos cualitativos muy ricos. Con el objeto de plantear una alternativa a la tensión metodológica mencionada, se presenta un diseño de entrevista semiestructurada que procura conservar las características distintivas de los intercambios conversacionales pero que también, permite obtener un volumen de datos que habilita la comparación entre sujetos y el procesamiento estadístico. En efecto, los datos obtenidos a partir de la implementación de una entrevista semidirigida a niños y niñas de 5 y 7 años, de dos diferentes niveles socioeconómicos permitió obtener no sólo una cantidad importante (860 unidades) de las cláusulas en estudio (Cláusulas relativas -Crs.-), sino además apreciar cuán valioso resulta conservar la mayor cantidad de características del uso lingüístico infantil en contexto, para comprender la compleja dinámica del desarrollo sintáctico. Así el análisis de la muestra permitió identificar la existencia de siete tipos de Crs. y observar que diferentes formas de Crs. coexisten en un mismo corte etario, pero que cada tipo posee funciones discursivas específicas.

ABSTRACT

In the literature about children syntactic development, particularly during last four decades, it's been frequently read that studies sustain on spontaneous speech samples, i.e., daily dialogic instances between children or between children and adults, are problematic because it's necessary to have a considerable amount of children talk to pick up the syntactic forms in study and carry out a statistical analysis (Demuth, 1996). Besides some studies consider that samples does not represent child language uses but some specific usages (Chomsky, 1969), and so the results lacks of validity and are only descriptions of syntactic tendencies (Lust, Flynn, & Foley, 1996) or that the data are spurious because in spontaneous contexts is difficult to control the interference of contextual variables (Echeverría, 1978). However there is consensus about the fact that these samples provide rich qualitative data. In order to pose an alternative to this methodological controversy, this paper presents a semistructured interview design that seeks to preserve the distinctive characteristics of conversational exchanges but allows obtaining a sizeable amount of children syntactic data, to make a comparison between subjects and statistical processing. The design takes into account the contributions of a group of cognitive perspectives about the processes by which the subjects produce, comprehend, acquire, and develop language Cognitive Linguistic (Lakoff, 1987; Langacker, 1987), Mental cognitive frames and Spaces Theory (Fauconnier, 1985), Gramaticalization Theory (Hopper, 1998), and Language Usage Model (Tomasello, 2001). Also it considers some methodological criteria from Sociolinguistics (Labov, 1991; Lavandera, 1984), Ethnography of speaking (Gumperz, 1982), Functionalist perspective on language development (Karmiloff-Smith, 1986), and a set of criteria developed in a previous exploratory research (Silva, 2001). We select interview because it's recognized that it's the situation which best reproduces the characteristics of everyday conversational interactions (Labov, 1991) and in it subjects (children or adults) tend to provide more information to a skilled interviewer than in questionnaires. We formulated a set of criteria that prevent reproducing experimental circumstances (i.e., children feel self-conscious and evaluated) and thus enable children to interact with the interviewer inthe most natural and spontaneous way as possible. The results obtained by Silva (2008) provided empirical support to the effectiveness of the methodological instrument developed. The aim of the study was to identify and describe the different forms of Relative Clauses (Rcs.) produced by two groups of children of 5 and 7 years in adult-child interactions. Considering the particular purposes of this research adaptations were made to the classical interview. The first adaptation was to convert the interview into a semi-structured interaction. With this technique we could obtain sizeable children autonomous speech and functional uses of Rcs.The instrument promotes children productions of discursive sequences by focusing the interaction on different significant childhood topics. So we had to identify, in a preliminary screening study, the discursive nuclei in the children communities. With the semi-structured interview we were able to collect 860 Rcs. and identify seven different types of Rcs. The analysis of the data allows us to sustain that different forms of Rcs. coexist at a same age and that they distribute their contexts of usage and their discursive functions. These results do not coincide with those of obtained previously in experimental studies (Gili & Gaya, 1972; Múgica & Solana, 1999; Solana, 1996, 1997). We believe that this discrepancy is due to the methodological tool used because it allowed observing the interrelation between syntactic forms and others discursive competence factors, such as Media Length Utterance. In sum, the methodological resource proposed seems to be a valuable tool to preserve much of child language usage characteristics in context and to understand the complex dynamics of syntactic development.