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

4.3 Results
I will discuss the results for each child in turn, beginning with the older children,
Manuel and Lorena, and then the younger children, Andrea and Vanesa. A child was
counted as knowing a certain word if they answered correctly for that word more often
than they answered incorrectly. Analysis of the most pertinent results (Vanesa and
Andrea) will come in Section 4.4. Because of the limited data, the results were not tested
for statistical significance. 16
4.3.1 Manuel
Manuel, who was nearly eight years old, scored almost perfectly on all the tests.
He got 100% of the body part questions correct, and 93.75% of the body part preposition
questions correct. He missed only two body part prepositions, one in each test. Clearly
Manuel was an adult for the purpose of this study, having acquired all of the body parts
and prepositions. He pointed to all of the pictures he chose with confidence and said that
the game was really easy. His results will not be discussed any further since they do not
bear on the developmental questions I am interested in.
4.3.2 Lorena
Lorena was less fluent in SLQZ than any of the other children tested. She spoke
primarily English and Spanish, as mentioned earlier, but spoke only SLQZ until age 3.
Her results are quite striking. She answered 100% of the body part questions correctly
and 0% of the body part preposition questions correctly. These results are displayed in
Table 16 below:
16 I hope to be able to replicate this study later with more participants.
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