The Categorial Status of Body Part Prepositions in Valley Zapotec ...

4.1 Participants
Four children were tested: Vanesa 1;6, Andrea 2;3, Lorena 6;4, and Manuel
7;11. 12 At the time, Vanesa was learning SLQZ as her primary language and also had
Spanish input. Andrea was learning both SLQZ and Spanish as her first languages.
Lorena initially learned SLQZ as her only language, until age 3, when she began learning
Spanish. At age 3;5 she began learning English. At the time I worked with her, she was
English and Spanish dominant. Manuel learned only Spanish until age 1;5, when he
began learning SLQZ. Like Lorena, he was dominant in English and Spanish. The
relevant data for most of this paper is from the two youngest girls, Vanesa and Andrea.
This experiment was conducted in March 2001. Previous to this study, I had
observed the children for another project, so they all knew me and were used to speaking
Zapotec in front of me.
4.2 Experimental Design
In order to test the children's understanding of body parts and BP locatives, two
forced-choice picture identification tasks were designed, testing the eight words listed in
Table 12. Each word was tested twice in each task; 16 questions for body parts and 16
questions for BP locatives, for a total of 32 questions. The tests were run twice on the
two younger girls, on separate occasions, but only once on the two older children.
12
The age range is so wide because I tested all the children that were present in the home
of the two youngest girls.
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