Acceso usuarios
Aprender el significado de las palabras implica comprender también el significado de los morfemas que las conforman. Con el propósito de aportar evidencia en torno al aprendizaje de nuevos morfemas en edades tempranas, en la presente investigación se diseñó una tarea de atención preferencial en la que participaron infantes de 18, 24 y 30 meses de edad. Durante el entrenamiento se les presentaron objetos con un corte ondulado o recto, asociando cada corte con un pseudomorfema (-sa o -go) en un conjunto de pseudopalabras. En la fase de prueba se presentaron ambos cortes en nuevos objetos, mientras se escuchaba una nueva pseudopalabra con uno de los pseudomorfemas entrenados. Los resultados indicaron la asociación del pseudomorfema -go con su referente, especialmente a los 18 y 30 meses de edad. Se discuten los posibles efectos que tuvieron las claves de regularidad en la tarea, no obstante, se da evidencia a favor de una destreza por parte de los infantes para identificar un nuevo morfema y asociarlo con su significado, habilidad fundamental para el aprendizaje de la morfología.
Learning the meaning of words entails also understanding the meaning of the morphemes in them. With the goal of providing evidence on the learning of new morphemes at very young ages, for this study we designed a preferential attention task with the participation of children aged 18, 24 and 30 months. During the training, they were presented with objects that had a wavy or straight cutout, with each kind of cutout associated with a pseudo-morpheme (-sa or -go) in a set of pseudo-words. In each phase of the trial, both kinds of cutouts were presented in new objects as the children listened to a new pseudo-word with one of the pseudo-morphemes in which they had been trained. The results indicated that the children were able to associate the pseudo-morpheme -go with its referent, especially at 18 and 30 months old. The possible effects of whether or not the morphemes in the task are regular are discussed; however, evidence was found in favour of the children having the ability to identify a new morpheme and associate it with its meaning, a fundamental skill in learning morphology.
