A Comparative Look at Spanish Acquisition

Abstract

In this chapter, I survey anecdotal evidence from Spanish child language which, like early French and Italian speech, reveals variability of word order and a strong preference for subject omission. There is some indication that the Spanish child passes through an early phase in which subject-verb order predominates, in contrast to Bates’ (1976) findings of a preference for verb-subject order in early Italian and, potentially, in contrast to Contreras’ (1987) claim that the ordering of [Spec, VP] and V’ in underlying structure is free in Spanish. Overall, however, the pattern of constructions found in early Spanish child language nicely paralleis the findings for French and English detailed above.