The main objective of the present study is to highlight which verbal tactics are associated with executive skills in the early stages, and how the emergence and anchoring of formal processes and various structures take place in this process. From the theoretical perspective of construction linguistics, which assumes the value of spontaneous verbal usages and the importance of a bottom-up route, the authors consider the acquisition of Spanish, examining in particular the presence and weight of communicative-interactive resources such as signalling, emphasis, maintenance of conversational threads, narrative voices, and temporal and spatial turns. The more specific aim here is to offer early evidence of such tactics, showing both their evolutionary tendency towards conscious and active interaction and their support in genuine semiotic-structural procedures characteristic of emergent grammar. For this purpose, they look at language production drawn from corpora of children's speech.
TopThe claim that executive functions are the necessary trigger for the cognitive-symbolic link that must take hold in the evolutionary process of language acquisition should not be seen as extreme. The initial verbal routines with a weak cognitive base gradually take on semiotic rootedness thanks to the gradual presence of these functions. Control, attention and reformulation bring with them regulated semiotic dimensions: from basic routines and automatisms, evolutionary development moves towards verbal uses governed by communicative intention and self-consciousness (Clark 1978, 2006). Thus, deliberate linguistic constructions are progressively given semiotic quality (Trevarthen 1998; Hernández Sacristán et alii 2012). Undoubtedly, over the course of language acquisition, resources emerge that are indicators of the value of executive functions, verbal practices that reveal gradual control, decision-making, inhibition, repair, or even reflexivity, and which indicate the course of cognitive maturity in tandem with communicative skills (Gombert 1992; Flórez-Romero, Torrado-Pacheco & Magnolia Mesa 2006). The main objective of the present study is to highlight which verbal tactics are associated with executive skills in the early stages, and how the emergence and anchoring of formal processes and various structures take place in this process. From the theoretical perspective of Construction Linguistics (Diessel 2019), which assumes the value of spontaneous verbal usages and the importance of a bottom-up route, we will consider the acquisition of Spanish, examining in particular the presence and weight of communicative-interactive resources such as signalling, intonational emphasis, maintenance of conversational threads, narrative voices, and temporal and spatial turns (Hickman 1985). The more specific aim here is to offer early evidence of such tactics, showing both their evolutionary tendency towards conscious and active interaction, and their support in genuine semiotic-structural procedures characteristic of emergent grammars. For this purpose, we will look at language production drawn from corpora of children’s speech, mostly from the Koiné corpus (https://sla.talkbank.org/TBB/phon/Spanish/Koine).
In linguistics it has not been common to approach communication in cognitive terms. The familiar serves to set out the dynamics of exchange in semiotic-social frameworks, so that the more common schema (Figure 1) tend to focus on the code and the message as static, instant products of utterance, while ignoring the active processes of composition and decoding.
However, some concepts arising from schools beyond classical structuralism—with a relatively comprehensive view of the complexity of the dimensions that define linguistic acts—have broken new ground in the area of communication-as-cognition. Visualisations of the dynamics here, such as those envisaged in the following representation (Figure 2),
Figure 2. Based (with modifications) on Jakobson (1956)