2017 - Mariscal - Auza - Typical Language Development

Typical Language Development
of Monolingual Spanish-Speaking Children
Sonia Mariscal and Alejandra Auza Benavides
Abstract This chapter aims at reviewing the process of acquisition of Spanish as a

first language. Firstly, the main characteristics of Spanish as a Romance Language
are explained, so phonological, syntactic and morphological traits of this language
are considered and exemplified. Secondly, and taking a constructivist view, early
phonological development, lexical acquisition, vocabulary growth and early mor-
phological development are reviewed selecting and making reference to the main
empirical studies undertook by different Spanish and South American researchers.
Different methodological approaches are also quoted when making reference to
empirical data: from Preferential Looking Paradigm, used to study word and mor-
pheme comprehension in children under three years of age, to longitudinal corpora
(CHILDES). We also review some production studies, that using elicitation tasks,
aim at getting specific linguistic structures or morphemes, as nominal plurals, gen-
der agreement in adjectives, etc. Fast-mapping studies that manipulate linguistic
categories (nouns vs. verbs), morphological variants (singular vs. plurals), and imi-
tation tasks (word and pseudoword repetition; sentence repetition) developed (or
being developed) for the study of Spanish acquisition by monolingual children are
also considered. We aim to present a complete review of Spanish language acquisi-
tion that can be used as a reference to those researchers or clinicians that study,
evaluate and program intervention with monolingual (and also bilingual) children
learning to speak Spanish.
Keywords Monolinguals • Spanish-speaking children • Phonology • Morphology

• Morphosyntax
S. Mariscal (*)
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid, Spain
e-mail: smariscal@psi.uned.es
A. Auza Benavides
Hospital General “Dr. Manuel Gea González”, Mexico City, Mexico
e-mail: alejandra.auza@yahoo.com
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017 3

A. Auza Benavides, R.G. Schwartz (eds.), Language Development and
Disorders in Spanish-speaking Children, Literacy Studies 14,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-53646-0_1
lenguaylenguaje@gmail.com
4 S. Mariscal and A. Auza Benavides
1 A
cquiring Spanish as a First Language:
The Problem-Space
In 1979 Karmiloff-Smith, a young Karmiloff-Smith, a former student of Piaget’s,

stated that language constituted a proper problem-space for children’s cognitive
development. We will take this metaphor as a frame work to organize this chapter
on the acquisition of Spanish as a first language, in the following sense: while chil-
dren acquire a language, any language, they apply a set of processing mechanisms
to the task of learning their particular language. Based on a constructivist view of
language acquisition (see for example, Tomasello 2000), during this process, which
begins in utero and extends beyond infancy, this set of mechanisms becomes tuned
to the language to be acquired. Moreover, specific linguistic representations gradu-
ally emerge out of this learning process.
Within this theoretical approach, the specific properties (or structure) of the lan-
guage to be acquired by the child constitute a kind of particular problem-space. In
this vein, the structure of Romance languages creates a different kind of problem-
space from the one created by the structure of any other languages, such as Slavic
or Germanic, for example. Given the commonalities between the properties of
human language and the human cognitive mechanisms themselves, there will be
processes that are common to the acquisition of different first languages (L1). But
given their typological differences, there will be particularities – both in the use of
mechanisms and representations – that need to be considered. Let us consider an
example from the phonological domain. From an early age, children become spe-
cialized in the perceptual properties of their first language. A learning mechanism
makes them more prone to attend to the phonetic characteristics and syllabic com-
binations in their native language (Kuhl 2004; Jusczyk and Aslin 1995). Since the
age of 6 months, children use prosodic information, such as rhythm organization, to
distinguish between their native and a foreign language. They develop important
perceptual abilities such as the recognition of specific phonemes that work as fron-
tiers of words. By the age of 9 months, they have learned the phonetic and phono-
tactic characteristics from their own language and before their first birthday, they
distinguish frequent from infrequent phonotactic sequences that will allow them to
segment a string of sounds into words (Jusczyk 2003; Saffran 2003).
As a Romance language, Spanish presents a set of properties that make its acqui-
sition different from the most investigated language, English. Before reviewing the
main developmental details of its acquisition as L1, we will briefly describe its
structural characteristics, those that define the problem-space of the task Spanish
monolingual children face as little language learners.
Typical Language Development of Monolingual Spanish-Speaking Children 5
2 P
honological, Syntactic and Morphological Properties
of the Spanish Language
Spanish has 5 vocalic sounds and 19 consonant phonemes (24 in English). Syllabic
structures include CV as the most frequent (56%), followed by CVC (20%), CCV
(10%) and VC (3%) (see Bosch 2004). Prosodically, rhythm in Spanish is syllable-
dependent in contrast to English, which is a stressed-time language. The fact that
English non-stressed syllables are reduced compared to stressed ones is a difficult
trait for Spanish learners of English as L2.
Spanish has a rich and complex verbal and nominal morphology. New words can
be constructed by derivation or by composition. Most derivation is through the addi-
tion of suffixes to the root word (zapato: zapatería [shoe: shoe-store]), and compo-
sition (sacapuntas [pencil sharpener]) is more infrequent than in Germanic
languages.
2.1 Word Order and Pronoun Dropping
As in many other Romance languages (see, for example, Clark 1985), the basic
word order in Spanish is SVO. The basic order changes from SVO to SOV when the
direct object is pronominalized. Pronominalized indirect objects also precede the
verb, except for the imperative verbal form:
(1) Pablo da la pelota a María vs. Pablo se la da

Subj Verb:sg DO:fem:sg IO:fem:sg vs Subj IO: PRO:masc:sg
DO:fem:sig Verb:sg
[Paul gives the ball to Mary] vs. [Paul gives it to her]
[IO: indirect object; DO: direct object; PRO: pronoun form;
masc: masculine; fem: feminine; sg: singular]
Noun and verb morphology in Spanish are much more abundant and varied than
in languages such as English. And it is the main difficulty L2 learners in Spanish.
Moreover, this morphological richness enables Spanish to be a pro-drop language.
Subjects are frequently omitted, as the information regarding the subject is included
in verb morphology. Thus, VsO is a common structure in oral Spanish (Vs being the
inflected verb) (López-Ornat 1992; Gallo 1994). The next example is extracted from
the Ornat corpus, (MacWhinney 2000). In the child’s sentence, produced when she
was 23 months of age, the use of first person present is underlined and the explicit
subject is omitted.
(2) María: Cálsotee. Cáso, papa. Pongo sapatitos.

[Child: Put (shoes) on you. (I) put on, daddy. (I) put shoes].
Padre: No, no me los pongas, hija.
[Father: No, don’t put them on me, daughter].
Another consequence of a verb-rich morphology is that word order is much freer

than in other Romance languages such as French. Both subject and object noun
phrases can be ordered to reflect the relative importance or thematic relevance or
topicalization. While English children are predominantly exposed to SVO sen-
tences: I read the book, Spanish children hear and use at least three frequent sen-
tence types: SVO: Yo leo el libro, VsO: Leo el libro, VSO: Leo yo el libro.
2.2 Noun Morphology and Agreement
In Spanish all nouns referring to beings, objects and events are marked as masculine
(masc) or feminine (fem). The gender and number of the noun must agree with other
elements in the definite article (in Spanish, el/los ‘the_masc, sg/pl’ and la/las ‘the_
fem, sg/pl’), which occurs more frequently in adult language than the indefinite
article un/unos (‘a_masc., sg/some_masc,pl.’ and una/unas ‘a_fem, sg/some_fem,
pl’). Other less frequently occurring form classes are adjectives (for example,
pequeño/a ‘small_masc/fem’), personal pronouns él/ellos ‘he/they’, ella/ellas ‘she/
they’ and other kinds of determiners and pronouns (for example, demonstratives
este/esta‘this_masc/fem’, indefinite otro/otra ‘another_masc/fem’ and possessives
mío/mía‘my_masc/fem.’). A second source of information is sublexical (phonetic),
and it derives from the fact that the endings of many nouns in Spanish are more
often associated with one gender than with the other: an –a ending is usually associ-
ated with feminine gender, and an – o ending usually indicates masculine gender.
There are exceptions. For example, number of masculine nouns end in –a, and a
very small number of feminine nouns ending in –o. Albeit some less frequent end-
ings such as –e or –l refer to an arbitrary gender: la fuente:fem [the fountain] – el
puente:masc [the bridge] or el árbol:masc [the tree] – la piel:fem [the skin]. There
are also nouns with no overt gender marking, such as botón [button].
Similarly, many adjectives show gender agreement by means of the same end-
ings found in nouns (−o and –a), but there is also an important group of adjectives
lacking these two endings; for example, grande [big] is invariant. According to
some linguistic proposals (see Harris 1991), −o and –a are word markers, rather
than gender markers, because they are not confined to lexical items that have gen-
der, being found also in adverbs. These sublexical cues seem to be treated as gender
markers both for L1 and L2 learners.
Besides gender, the number of Spanish nouns, determiners, pronouns and adjec-
tives is expressed in a bound morpheme. This is –s or –es at the end of the root. For
instance:
(3) la silla es blanca vs. las sillas son blancas

[the chair is white_sg’ vs. the chairs are
white_pl]
2.3 Sentence Type Constructions
In Spanish, interrogatives do not require special verb forms nor word movement
(e.g., Te doy leche versus ¿Te doy leche? [I give you milk]. The Wh-words (what/
qué, who/quién etc.) and rising intonation are the unique requirements.
For all kind of sentences subjects must agree in person and number with the verb.
For example, in ‘me gusta tu camisa versus me gustan tus camisas’, the subjects (tu
camisa and tus camisas/ ‘your shirt’ and ‘your shirts’), which appear after the
verb – the prototypical position of the direct object -, agree in number with it (gusta_
sg/‘likes’ vs.gustan_pl/‘like’). The formation of complex sentences is similar to
English, but it includes compulsory verb agreement and its varied forms, allowing
pronoun drop and varied word orders. For example:
(4) Si yo fuera una mujer rica, viajaría alrededor del mundo

[If I were a rich woman, I would travel around the world]
Or the relative sentences:
(5) Este libro que leí en el instituto es una de las mejores novelas que he leído
en mi vida
[This book that I read in high school is one of the best novels that
I have read in my life].
Many complex sentences (mainly object and subject clauses) in Spanish need
subjunctive verbal forms, although in English the indicative form is used. For
example:
(6) Quiero que vengas el martes

[I want you to come on Tuesday]
The subjunctive is also compulsory in negative imperative sentences. Thus, in

Spanish, the present imperative is used to give an order, as in Siéntate [Sit down],
but the present subjunctive is used in the negative imperative– No te sientes [Do not
sit down].
2.4 Verb System
Spanish verbs are inflected for person, number, tense, aspect and mood. There are
three conjugations (1st, 2nd and 3rd) and a typical verb can have around 100 differ-
ent forms (see Table 1). For regular verbs, this variability is found at the end of the
word, so attention final sounds and syllables is crucial to learning Spanish morphol-
ogy. On the contrary, for irregular verbs morphological changes frequently imply
changes in the verbal stem.
3 Spanish Language Acquisition
The next few sections include a selection of research on Spanish language acquisi-
tion. The number of studies conducted since the 1980s has increased rapidly, so this
is not an exhaustive review. Special attention will be paid to some characteristics of
its acquisition that make it particularly interesting, such as early phonology, verb
morphology, gender agreement and lexical development.
3.1 Early Phonological Development
The first year of life is crucial for learning the “sound substance” of a language.
From around nine months of age infants become tuned in with the phonological
properties of their L1; that is, its prosodic, phonetic and phonotactic characteristics.
(Werker and Tees 1984; Mehler et al. 1988; Nazzi et al. 1998). However, most of the
evidence comes from studies with English participants and research in Spanish is
very scarce. Bosch and Sebastián-Gallés (2001), working with babies in a labora-
tory in Barcelona, showed early sensibility to phonotactic clusters in 10-month old
monolingual and bilingual (Spanish-Catalan) children. In a more recent paper,
Bosch et al. (2013) found very early segmentation abilities in infants from six months
of age. Children that young were able to segment new words in fluent speech when
these items matched the rhythmic units of Spanish and Catalan, which are syllable-
timed languages. For this study, three different language groups (two monolingual
and one Catalan-Spanish bilingual) and two age groups (8-and 6-month-old infants)
were tested using natural language and a modified version of the Head Turn
Preference Procedure (HTPP). All groups at both ages exhibited word segmenta-
tion, but the preference pattern differed by age. A novelty preference was exhibited
by older children, while the expected familiarity preference was only found at the
younger age tested, suggesting a more advanced segmentation ability with an
increase in age. This is the first evidence of an early ability for monosyllabic word
Table 1 Conjugation and examples of the verb ‘to love’ (118 word forms)
Indicative Subjunctive
Present Present perfect Present Present perfect
amo he amado ame haya amado
amas has amado ames hayas amado
aman ha amado ame haya amado
amamos hemos amado amemos hayamos amado
amáis habéis amado améis hayáis amado
aman han amado amen hayan amado
Imperfective past Past perfect Imperfective Past perfect
past
amaba había amado amara hubiera amado
amabas habías amado amaras hubieras amado
amaba había amado amara hubiera amado
amabamos habíamos amado amáramos hubiéramos amado
amabáis habíais amado amárais hubiérais amado
amaban habían amado amaran hubieran amado
Perfective past Preterite perfect Future Future perfect
imperfect
amé hube amado amare hubiere amado
amaste habiste amado amares hubieres amado
amó hubo amado amare hubiere amado
amamos hubimos amado amáremos hubiéremos amado
amásteis hubísteis amado amáreis hubiereis amado
amaron hubieron amado amaran hubieren amado
Future imperfect Future perfect Imperative Impersonal forms
amaré habré amado ama (tú) Simple infinitive/
amarás habrás amado ame (él) compound
amará habrá amado amemos amar/haber amado
amaremos habremos amado (nosotros)
amaréis habréis amado améis Gerund
(vosotros)
amarán habrán amado amen (ellos) amando/habiendo
amado
Participle amado
Conditional/condicional Compound conditional/
simple condicional compuesto
amaría habría amado
amarías habrías amado
amaría habría amado
amaríamos habríamos amado
amaríais habríais amado
amarían habrían amado
Table 2 Miguel’s first words Form Meaning and situation

(12–15 months of age)
‘papá’ To point to or call to his father
‘mamá’ To point to or call to his mother
‘ala’ Equivalent to ‘hello’
‘ti-tá’ To refer to a clock or a watch
(onomatopoeic sound)
‘aba’ To ask for ‘agua’ [water]
segmentation in infants acquiring syllable-timed languages, such as Spanish or

Catalan. Interestingly, natural speech in the form of infant-directed speech was
used. This variable, together with the fact that target words were often aligned to
phrase boundaries demarcated by pauses, facilitated the task.
Early segmentation abilities constitute a basic ingredient for the task of learning
the phonological properties of the L1. But they are not sufficient by themselves to
explain the acquisition of words and other linguistic units for communicating. It is
necessary to associate these linguistic forms to relevant meanings in the language to
be acquired. This association or linking between linguistic forms and functions or
meanings begins gradually during the first year of life and becomes increasingly
rapid in the second year of life. The general developmental trend of vocabulary
acquisition is also seen for Spanish children. At the beginning, the process is very
slow. Learning the first ten words takes months. Frequent words (mama/‘mommy’,
papa/‘daddy’, agua/‘water’) and expressions (se ha ido/‘it’s gone’, se ha roto/‘it’s
broken’, a comer/‘let’s eat’) are segmented and understood in familiar contexts of
use; afterward they can be produced. Miguel’s – one of the author’s own Spanish
child - first words are shown in the next table. All of them have a simple syllabic
structure and refer to relevant persons, objects and situations that are of interest to
him (Table 2).
3.2 Early Lexical Development
Jackson-Maldonado et al. (2003) developed the first Spanish version (Mexican
Spanish) of the Mac Arthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories
(MCDI). In both languages, mama and papa, mommy and daddy were reported to
be produced by the greatest number of children (Jackson-Maldonado et al. 1993).
Animal sounds and names for objects also had a high frequency of occurrence in
both languages, as did names of things children usually manipulate (toys, body parts
and foods). Certain quantifiers had a high frequency, more, some, too, all in English,
and ya, más, no hay [done, more, there isn’t] in Spanish. Both yes and no, sí and no,
were reported for very young children. As has been very well established in many
studies (e.g., Serra et al. 2000), function words do not appear in early vocabularies.
These data have been supported by evidence stemming from the Spanish version of
400
300
Vocabulary
200
100
0
8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
AGE mos. Understands

AGE mos.
Understands & Says
Fig. 1 Mean of words understood and produced from 8 to 15 months of age and development of
word production up to 30 months (compiled by the author from López-Ornat et al. 2005)
MCDI derived for a sample of children from Spain (López-Ornat et al. 2005).
Analysis showed the well-known imbalance between comprehension and produc-
tion of words and the quick developmental trend of acquiring new words after the
first 50 items are acquired (see Fig. 1).
An interesting research tool- CLEX (Cross-linguistic Lexical Norms) - devel-
oped by Rune et al. (2010) and accessible at http://www.cdi-clex.org, includes
vocabulary data from Mexican Spanish children, 8–30 months of age, for cross-
linguistic comparisons. The database (n = 1872 children) was contributed by
Jackson-Maldonado’s team, the authors of the Mexican Spanish version of the
MCDI. CLEX can be used to explore trajectories of individual words and word
categories, to depict vocabulary size curves and for many other analyses.
3.3 V
ocabulary Growth After First Words and Early
Morphological Development
After the first words are acquired (comprehended and produced), the pace at which
vocabulary is learned is accelerated. Many studies of different languages have
reported on vocabulary spurts and other lexical trajectories (for a review in Spanish,
see Mariscal and Gallo 2015a).
In the case of Spanish, the same database gathered by López-Ornat et al. (2005)
was analyzed by Gallego and Mariscal (2007) in an effort to learn about vocabulary
composition after first words. Their results showed that the early lexicon in Spanish
children under 30 months of age includes a higher percentage of nouns in all ages
(60%), followed by predicates (verbs and adjectives), which increase from 8% at 16
months to 18% at 30 months. Function words were produced at a rate of around
10% in all ages (starting from 16 months), although during the first months children
produce fillers or protomorphemes instead of proper function words. Organizing
these data as a function of vocabulary size (0–50 words, 51–100, 101–200 and so on
up to 600 words) yields a developmental sense of the emerging picture. Although
nouns are still dominant in every age range, their trajectory shows an increase from
the initial 0–50 word-stage to 101–200. It then stabilizes at around 60% in compari-
son with total vocabulary and decreases (40%) after 400 words are produced. Verbs
and function words represent only 10% of total vocabulary when it is under 50
words, and then its evolution differs: verbs begin to increase in frequency and reach
20% by the end of the study, while function words maintain their percentage of use
below verbs. However, given the methodology used to gather these data (parent
report), it is necessary to specify if these words change their representational status
as the acquisition process develops from the initial phases. At the beginning of the
developmental process, function words are attached to content words, as in auxil-
iary verbs - for example, a’oto (se ha roto) [it’s broken] -, or they are only produced
in a fuzzy form apota instead of la pelota [the ball] that make it difficult to assign
them a syntactic representational status (see, for example, Mariscal (2009) - for the
case of determiners).
The form that words take in children’s vocabularies before they have mastered
the phonological and articulatory properties of the language have been examined in
detail elsewhere (Bosch 2004). This work provides not only important developmen-
tal data (ages of acquisition, typical phonological processes in Spanish children,
etc.), but also serves as a tool to assess children’s phonological abilities from 3 to 7
years of age.
Going back to Fig. 1, the change in the pace at which new words are acquired
after the first 50 is remarkable.
In morphologically rich languages, children begin to use morphemes as a cue to
learn new words from early on. Although vocabulary studies only tend to consider
new roots, in Romance languages an important way for vocabulary to grow is
through the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology. Given that the
latter is a key for vocabulary expansion in Spanish, children start using derivational
morphemes productively since the age of three. This has been observed in different
languages (Clark 1993, 1997) includying Spanish, specifically using frequent mor-
phemes such as the agentives -ador, -ero [-er] or the adjectives -ón, -oso [-y] which
continue to be productive until the school years (Auza 2005, 2006, 2008; Auza and
Hernández 2005).
As Hoff (2009) summarized, morphemes that are frequent and have a stable and
recognizable form are easier and consequently, are acquired early. There are three
sources of empirical evidence that corroborate this acquisition pattern in Spanish:
(1) parent-report data; (2) longitudinal naturalistic studies; and (3) experimental
research on language comprehension and production. We will review the main
developmental trends of morphological development in Spanish by referring to rel-

evant research undertaken in (European) Spanish and in other varieties of the lan-
guage. Evidence related to comprehension and production will be considered,
although comprehension data are more limited.
3.4 Comprehending Words and Morphemes in Spanish
As mentioned in the first section of this chapter, gender agreement is one of the main
morpho-syntactic phenomena in Spanish. In spite of this fact, only a few recent stud-
ies regarding the use of this cue to identify words and help in vocabulary acquisition
have been published. As noted above, there are methodological reasons for this.
Fortunately in recent years researchers of Mexican-Spanish have conducted several
studies with young children on the importance of gender information in the segmen-
tation and acquisition of new nouns (Alva-Canto et al. 2014; Arias-Trejo & Barrón,
this volume; Arias-Trejo and Alva-Canto 2012; Arias-Trejo et al. 2013, 2014b).
In an initial experiment using the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm
(IPLP), Arias-Trejo et al. (2013) showed that 30- and 36-month old infants, but not
24-month olds, can anticipate the referent of common objects when they listen to
definite articles paired with their regular and irregular object nouns. However, for
those 30 month-old children the identification of the objects with regular nouns
depended on the fact that they were paired with distractors that also had regular
nouns. In contrast, the 36-month old children were also able to identify objects
paired with irregular endings. In a second experiment, indefinite articles were used
in noun phrases. The results showed that children as young as 24 months of age
were able to anticipate the target nouns, but again if they were paired with regular
nouns for the distractors. Thus, Mexican-Spanish children were able to anticipate a
referent like globo [balloon_masc_regular]’ if it appeared with muñeca [doll_fem_
regular], but they failed if it was paired with flor [flower_fem_irregular]; or they
could identify manzana [apple_fem_regular] if shown together with caballo
[horse_masc_regular] as a distractor, but they could not if it appeared with pastel
[cake_masc_irregular].
As the authors stated: “(Spanish-speaking) infants, from 2 to 3 years of age, are
sensitive to the information included in article-noun pairs. At the beginning, around
24 months of age, infants rely on phonological regularities for anticipating which
referent will be named; however, at 3 years of age infants are flexible in their use of
strategies: depending on the information available, they are able to use phono-
morphological or syntactic cues” (Alva-Canto et al. 2014: pp.99; translated from
the original in Spanish).
In another experiment, Arias-Trejo et al. (2014b) showed that Spanish 30-month
old children were able to use gender phono-morphological cues (the endings –a and
–o) present in adjectives to learn new nouns. Using IPLP and testing two
pseudonames (feminine betusa and masculine pileco), they showed that children at
this age were able to associate the new names with the appropriate objects by r elying
on phono-morphological gender clues present in the adjectives used during the

training phase. Specifically, they learned to associate the new feminine noun
(betusa) with the object previously described by a feminine adjective: mira, es roja
[look it’s red_fem], and the new masculine noun (pileco) with the object described
by a masculine adjective: mira, es rojo [look it’s red_masc].
These studies are the first in Spanish to show the effect of the early acquisition of
grammatical gender on language receptive processing. Their authors interpreted the
experimental results by stating that gender agreement knowledge favors speech pro-
cessing in a language like Spanish. Together with gender, number morphemes
appear in determiners, nouns and adjectives in Spanish. In addition, plural noun
phrases must agree in number with verbs.
In contrast, first language acquisition of English follows a very different pattern
(Kouider et al. 2006). At 24 months of age, children do not use the information from
the plural morpheme –s in sentences like Look at the blickets to address their atten-
tion to the appropriate image of a set of objects. At this age, children need redundant
morphological information – like the one included in Look, there are some blickets.
In contrast to 36 month-old children, younger children needed multiple cues in
order to understand the referent of a plural noun phrase. English has three allo-
phones of the plural morpheme /s/, which could hamper its identification and acqui-
sition process. However, Spanish has two allomorphs (/s/ and /es/), with /s/ being
the primary one (Lleó 2006); /s/ is added to words ending in vowel and /es/ to items
with a final consonant or a stressed vowel. More than 80% of common nouns end in
a vowel.
Thus, in Spanish there is a dominant allomorph that frequently appears after a
vowel (casa-casas)/ [house/houses], which makes it more salient than in English
and other languages. Another critical characteristic of Spanish number agreement is
that it constitutes a structured and redundant system. In contrast to an English sen-
tence such as I like yellow apples, in which plural morphology is only marked on the
noun, the Spanish equivalent – Me gustan las manzanas amarillas –includes plural
morphemes in the article, noun and adjective that must agree. All these characteris-
tics could explain the early acquisition of number morphemes by Spanish children.
As is the case with gender agreement, few studies have examined the compre-
hension of plural in Spanish. Little is known about the sensitivity of children to
number morphemes before the age of 3 years. Arias-Trejo et al. (2014a) used a simi-
lar procedure to Kouider et al. (2006) with 24-month old Mexican children. In the
initial experiment, they presented sentences that included pseudonouns and redun-
dant number cues (e.g., Mira, es una teba vs. Mira, son unas tebas) / [look, this is a
teba vs. look, those are some tebas] while in the second one they only used number
morphemes in the noun phrase. When the sentences included plural morphemes, the
children looked more frequently to the screen with eight objects versus the screen
with only one object. The preference for the screen depicting the target plural image
increased after the presentation of the sentence; it was not a general perceptual pref-
erence. Similar results were obtained in the second experiment. Two-year old
Spanish children also showed a preference for the screen with more than one object
when they heard plural noun phrase. Curiously, this effect was found when the
p lural screen included eight, but not two objects. Mexican children of 24 and 30
months of age were able to understand that a plural noun phrase corresponded to a
set of two objects (versus one, in the other screen) only when the noun phrase
appeared in a sentence including other plural morphemes (in the verb as in Mira son
unas ponas [Look, those are some ponas].
To summarize, these studies reveal an early sensitivity by Spanish children to
plural morphemes. Developmental differences with English children might be
explained by the specific properties of the Spanish language: its redundancy,
saliency and ease of articulation.
The other defining characteristic of the Spanish language is its extensive verb
morphology, as we showed at the beginning of the chapter. Evidence on the use of
verb morphosyntactic properties for lexical acquisition is scarce. Falcón and Alva-
Canto (2007) is an interesting study on the use of morphosyntactic cues to learn
verbs versus nouns. They carried out an IPLP experiment with 24 month-old chil-
dren. Two pseudowords were used – pile and liba –appearing in two different syn-
tactic contexts: as a verb (e.g., la flor pile/ the flower piles) and as a noun (e.g., un
pile/ a pile). In contrast to studies carried out in English (Naigles 1990), which
supported the use of syntactic cues (transitive vs. intransitive structures) to learn
new verbs, in the Falcón et al. study the results did not support the hypothesis of
syntactic bootstrapping. They showed that children tend to map the new words with
new objects, independently of the linguistic context of presentation. In their discus-
sion of these results, the authors considered that the young age of the children could
explain why they did not seem to use the syntactic frames as a cue to map the pseu-
dowords (verb and noun) with their appropriate referents (action and object). But
there is another possible explanation; it could be that for Spanish-speaking children,
syntactic cues are less reliable by themselves for learning new words. The morpho-
logical cues used in the experiment were not perceptually prominent (the – e ending
of both pseudowords), and they could not be added to the syntactic information.
Thus, when morphological and syntactic cues act in unison, the ability to learn new
words in different categories increases.
This was precisely the hypothesis used to guide a second experiment (Jasso et al.
2014), which relied on the same method. Two pseudowords ending in -ando (equiv-
alent to ‘-ing’) were used within two syntactic contexts, as a pseudoverb (la flor
pilando)/[the flower piling] and as a noun (un pilando)/[a piling]. Results with two-
year old children were not clearcut; only some infants showed clear preference for
the verb-like scene when hearing la flor pilando versus un pilando. Again, the
authors considered the early age as a possible explanation for the absence of clear
effects and underlined the need to carry out further studies with 30- and 36-month
old children. There is another problem: the linguistic stimuli used, both for the verb-
like and noun-like context, sound quite strange in Spanish. On the one hand, the –
ndo morpheme appears in the present continuous, but without the copulative verb
(la flor pilando/ the flower piling instead of la flor está pilando/ the flower is piling),
the absence of the copula makes the sentence very unusual in our language. On the
other hand, the -ndo ending for a noun is quite infrequent, especially in children’s
vocabularies and the type of language used with them.
A different methodology that was used to study the early learning of new nouns
versus verbs in Spanish is Fast-Mapping. Pulido et al. (2007) (based on Lamela
2004) carried out a replica of the classic study by Golinkoff et al. (1992) using
Spanish pseudoverbs. The results showed that two- and three-year-old children
identified a significantly lower number of verbs than children of 4 years of age.
These authors hypothesized that Spanish morphological richness might produce a
delay in the fast-mapping of pseudoverbs in comparison with English. However,
they suggest that this morphological variability could exert an influence, not by
itself, but in interaction with other variables, such as vocabulary size.
Based on Rujas (2014), another fast-mapping study (Casla et al. 2015); exam-
ined children’s use of noun and verb morphology to learn pseudowords. The study
involved 38 Spanish children, 23 of them with typical language development (TD),
and 15 late-talking children. They took part in a longitudinal study, with data being
gathered at three different times (T1, T2, T3). At T1 the children were 24–28 months
of age (M = 28 months); 6 months later, at T2, when children were 30–38 months
of age (M = 34 months), they were tested again. T3 took place 8 months later (M =
42 months). We will only consider the TD participants’ performance.
The aim of the study was to examine the role played by syntactic and morpho-
logical variables in the identification and extension of new words. These variables
were word category (noun vs. verb) and morphological frequency (singular vs. plu-
ral morphemes). The design was similar to Golinkoff and Hirsh-Pasek (2006), but
four conditions were established (two grammatical categories and two morphemes).
The children’s task consisted of disambiguating new lexical items (pseudonouns
and pseudoverbs) by mapping them to unknown objects or actions. In the second
phase, the children were asked to extend the new words, just mapped, to objects
with different colors and to actions performed by different actors. The wordlikeness,
syllable length and conjugations (for pseudoverbs) were controlled. Pictures of
objects (one vs. two) and actions performed by one or more than one actor were
paired with the new words. So, for example, for the pseudoverb nupar, a girl (or two,
for plural) was shown in a picture with one of her arms raised and the other stretched
out to her side. Adults did not have a specific label for this kind of action, saying, for
example that the girl was playing to estirarse así [stretch like that]. There were four
trials for every fast-mapping task. First (identification phase), four pictures with
three known objects and one unknown were shown to the children. By asking chil-
dren for the known objects or actions, the researchers were able to establish that
they were familiar with their names. In the second phase of the task (disambiguation
of new labels), the researchers asked for the unknown ítems (dónde están los nupos?
[where are the nupos ?] or dónde nupan ? [where do they nupan ?]. The third phase
(extension of new labels) involved presenting a new member of the same category
(noun or verb), together with two known objects/actions and a new unknown object
(distractor). As these three phases were repeated in four different trials, the children
were asked to identify four new labels. The presentation order was varied between
participants, together with the position of the unknown objects and the distractors.
The results for the pseudowords (both nouns and verbs) revealed that the task
was easily solved by two-year old children, although the scores improved from 24
to 36 months (66% to 89% correct responses). In the extension phase, their perfor-
mance was better than in the identification phase after the children were exposed to
the new labels several times. However, a morpheme effect was only found for nouns;
singular new nouns were easier to map than plural ones in the experiment. This
effect was significant for T1, and for T2 and T3, the difference between singular and
plural was evident, although non-significant, due to a ceiling effect.
The results for pseudoverbs were more complex. The percentage of correct
responses was lower than for nouns in all ages, although the 2-year old children
were able to solve the task for more than 50% of the trials. The scores were better
in the extension than in the disambiguation phase. No advantage for singular versus
plural was found at any age, contrary to results with pseudonouns.
Rujas (2014) wondered why new singular pseudoverbs do not seem easier than
their plural counterparts when in the linguistic input, singular forms (both for nouns
and verbs) are more frequent. Even though more research is needed to clarify this
question, the complexity of verbal number agreement (compared with plurality in
nouns), both formally and functionally, might be proposed as a good cue.
Fast-mapping can be seen as an important ability when learning new words.
However, as several authors have noted recently, this process only constitutes the
very first step in building a complete word representation. In our view, more experi-
mental research is needed in Spanish to tease out the relative value of syntactic and
morphological cues, used separately and together, especially for learning verbs. The
next section reviews production studies on the acquisition of verb morphology.
Again, as is the case for noun morphology, this kind of research is more abundant in
comparison with comprehension studies.
3.5 Acquisition of Spanish Morphology: Production Studies
The acquisition of Spanish free-standing morphemes, specifically their production,

has been studied using spontaneous speech samples, parent-report data and experi-
mental (or quasi-experimental) tasks. Longitudinal studies of natural interactions
have been more abundant than experiments, but experimental tasks are being
increasingly used in recent years. The selection of studies relied more clearly on
theoretical models and explanations rather than mere descriptions.
In the transition form early vocabulary to grammar development, different stud-
ies have assumed that early lexical developmeant not only occurs prior to, but it is
actually a pre-requisite for, the emergence of morphosyntactic constructions (Bates
et al. 1994; Marchman and Bates 1994). The critical mass hypothesis posits that the
acquisition of a certain number of words – a critical mass – is needed to start the
process of creating abstract morphological patterns. This hypothesis favors a con-
tinuous view of language development.
Research aimed at exploring the interdependency of lexical and morphosyntactic
development has been conducted mainly for English. Only a few studies have been
published involving languages with rich morphological systems (e.g., Bassano
2000; Caselli et al. 1999); Devescovi et al. 2005; Serrat et al. (2004); Stolt et al.
2009). For bilingual children learning English and Spanish, Marchman et al. (2004)
found strong correlations between vocabulary and grammar within each language.
In Catalan and in Spanish, Serrat et al. (2004) specifically studied the interrelated-
ness of verb vocabulary and the morphosyntactic aspects related to the verb gram-
mar (i.e., morphological productivity and syntactic complexity). Six children took
part in this study of spontaneous language, two of whom where Catalan monolin-
gual, two Spanish monolingual and two bilingual. Contrary to Bassano’s (2000)
results from Italian data, the children learned verbs at a constant pace, and no period
of lexical acceleration was observed. Other studies with bilingual Spanish-English
children have shown that verb acquisition occurs in stages, being error rates gener-
ally low. Also, cross-linguistic influence seems to play a role in the acquisition of
some verb forms in children learning more than one language (Dubasik and Wilcox
2013; Silva-Corvalán and Montanari 2008). Studies measuring developmental
changes in children’s verb use have noted an increase in the number of verb types
used by children as they progress toward later stages of verb acquisition thus regard-
ing verb use as a lexical and grammatical developmental marker.
However, a significant increase in verb morphology was observed at a certain
point in the children’s development. There was evidence for a period of morphologi-
cal acceleration in verb acquisition within the context of a constant lexical increase.
The authors posit that their results were not incompatible with the critical mass
hypothesis because acquiring a certain number of verbs (i.e. a critical mass of verbs)
may be a pre-requisite to the morphological spurt observed. The aforementioned
quantity of verbs, along with the period of time needed before being able to generate
abstract regularities, would both be necessary for morphological development to
advance.
Based on correlation analyses of the MCDI samples, Pérez-Pereira and García-
Soto (2003) for Galician, Jackson-Maldonado et al. (2003) for Mexican Spanish,
and López-Ornat et al. (2005) for European Spanish found high correlations between
vocabulary scores and different measures of grammar development (MLU, mea-
sures of morphology and grammar complexity). Mariscal and Gallego (2012) fur-
ther analyzed data from the European Spanish MCDI (ES MCDI), including 593
children from 16 to 30 months of age. Their aims were: (1) to analyze the relation-
ship between total vocabulary and grammar, and the relationship between noun and
verb vocabularies, and their respective morphologies; (2) to analyze whether the
predictive value of vocabulary to grammar was the same for all children in the
sample, particularly for those whose vocabulary scores fell in the lowest percentiles;
and, (3) to determine the function (linear or non-linear) that best defined the rela-
tionship between vocabulary and grammar development.
Regression analysis was conducted to evaluate the relationship between age,
vocabulary (total vocabulary, nouns, and verbs) and grammatical scores on two sub-
sections of the Grammar Part, related to noun and verb morphology, respectively.
The total vocabulary explained a significantly greater proportion of variance in
grammatical outcomes than age did.
However, noun and verb vocabularies did not explain a greater proportion of
variance in their respective morphologies than total vocabulary did. Additionally,
the predictive relationship between vocabulary and grammar was found to be
weaker for children whose scores were below the tenth percentile, although this
could have been due to the small variability in this group and to extreme cases. The
authors stated that in crosslinguistic studies, the global vocabulary size of children
is the best approach for comparing grammar development between languages and
between children. They suggested that more homogeneous samples would be
selected if gathered as a function of linguistic (vocabulary) level, rather than chil-
dren’s age.
From a theoretical perspective, these results were compatible with an interactive
view of language development according to which, complex relationships operate at
many levels between different language components during the acquisition process.
Those components (lexicon and grammar, for example) are relatively independent
according to the ‘adult’ definition of the process, but that is not necessarily so from
the point of view of the language learner (López-Ornat 1999; Marchman and Bates
1994; Tomasello 2000), at least initially (Bates and Goodman 1997). Given the
nature of the data (cross-sectional, parent report and correlational), the directional-
ity of the relationship between vocabulary and grammar could not be established in
this study.
In spite of the effort made to go beyond mere global measures of lexical and
grammatical progress, the Mariscal and Gallego’s (2012) analyses of the relation-
ships between noun and verb vocabularies and their respective morphologies (gen-
der and number for nouns; person, tense, modality and aspect for verbs) revealed
that they were no more robustly associated than with total vocabulary. In the case of
nouns, this result could be attributed to the composition of the ES MCDI vocabulary
list, which contains a very high percentage of nouns (53%), compared to other syn-
tactic categories.
However, the same cannot be said of verbs, as they are less well represented in
the vocabulary list (15.48%). According to the authors, a more plausible explana-
tion for these results has to do with the very nature of the morphological measures
used in these kinds of inventories. If we analyze the items in the Word Endings sec-
tion in detail, the difficulty of accessing data related to morphological productivity
becomes very apparent. The format of the questions that comprise the MCDIs (orig-
inal and adaptations), along with the fact that parents are reporting, are not condu-
cive to gathering critical evidence of the presence or absence of productivity in
children’s utterances. If children produce any tokens at all, even if it is only one of
the morphemes they are asked about in the Word Endings section, parents will inev-
itably report it. However, this does not provide enough information to evaluate
whether children are producing morphemes in a productive way. For example, a
child might produce the third person plural of certain verbs, but their use could still
be linked to specific contexts of use, and not yet be generalized to other verb roots;
his/her parents would nonetheless report it on the inventory. That is the case with
mira [look] or oye [listen] which they are not “real verbs” with third person singu-
lar, but pragmatic attention callers.
In Romance languages, the criteria for establishing morphological productivity

are one of the most challenging issues on research in grammar acquisition. Both in
studies that analyze spontaneous language and in more controlled studies of linguis-
tic production, it is crucial to establish if children’s utterances can be considered
morphologically productive, and to what degree.
A tool such as the MCDI has numerous advantages for evaluating early linguistic
development, as many studies have shown (Bleses et al. 2008; Fenson et al. 2007;
Westerlund et al. 2006), but it is also important to bear in mind its limitations, espe-
cially for rich morphological languages. According to Dale et al. (1989) the CDI
was originally conceived as the language equivalent of a “height and weight chart”
for pediatricians as a useful tool for assessing early language skills, but which might
limit the evaluation of the complete linguistic development. Instead of tapping on
morphological productivity, this instrument could be credited with detecting
grammatical-relevant vocabulary (i.e., those morphological variations on the word
forms).
The following section reviews different production studies on the process
involved in acquiring the most salient morphosyntactic systems in Spanish. The aim
is not so much to draw a developmental profile with ages or order of acquisition, but
rather to provide crucial evidence to understand the underlying processes.
3.6 The Acquisition Process for Spanish Gender Agreement
In spite of its level of abstraction, gender agreement is a linguistic subsystem that

seems to be acquired early in development. There is longitudinal evidence
(Hernández-Pina 1984; Mariscal 1996, 2001; López-Ornat 1997; Lleó 1997) show-
ing that article–noun agreement in Spanish appears to be acquired by the age of
three or even earlier. And, similarly to acquisition by Italian- and French-speaking
children, the process seems to be relatively problem-free (Pizzuto and Caselli 1992).
For children acquiring Spanish as their first language, gender agreement errors are
few when compared to other kinds of morphological errors, such as tense and per-
son agreement in the verbal system (see below).
Data obtained from the Spanish corpus Ornat indicate that the percentage of
gender errors, including late errors which affect clitics, is only 8.8% (Mariscal
1998). Some of these errors are over-regularizations such as *la fantasma
[the_*feminine ghost (masculine)] (2;04). In contrast to these data, learners of
Spanish as a second language (L2) produce a high percentage of gender agreement
errors (Fernández-García 1999). It seems clear that the reasons for these differences
lie in the learning process followed by L1 and L2 learners.
Several longitudinal studies of spontaneous speech (Hernández-Pina 1984;
Aguirre 1995; Mariscal 1996; López-Ornat 1997; Lleó 1997) found a high fre-
quency of determiner omissions in obligatory contexts during the initial phases of
the noun phrase acquisition process. Children seemed to gradually fill in the
p ositions before nouns with phonological forms that increasingly approximated the
adult determiner forms.
However, from very early on, even from the so-called one-word stage (Lleó
1997), children already produce some syllables or vowel-like elements before
nouns. An example is a pé (‘a’ standing for schwa), an utterance produced by a
child, under 2 years old, pointing to a fish (in Spanish, el/un pez [the/a fish_mascu-
line]). This kind of evidence is parallel to that found first in English (Bloom 1970;
Peters and Menn 1993) and then in other languages: the so-called ‘fillers’. For noun
phase structures, fillers found before nouns occupy what would be a determiner slot.
Descriptively, in Romance languages these linguistic units are under-specified pho-
nologically and appear randomly in combinations with both masculine and femi-
nine nouns. Gradually, their phonological form and their distribution converge with
the adult-like model. The interesting question is what happens in between first uses
and more generalized and correct productions. Theoretically, the question is how to
interpret non-adult utterances: what is the representational status of early forms and
why do they disappear or evolve later on. Pre-noun fillers have been interpreted dif-
ferently. Certain Spanish authors, such as Lleó (1997, 2001), have adopted a genera-
tivist stance and stated the availability of the functional category of determiner from
the beginning of the acquisition process, but “it is undifferentiated because the pho-
nological component is still immature” (Lleó 1997: pp. 255). Along the same lines,
Aguirre (1995) explained the high percentage of determiner omissions solely
through performance factors. Mariscal (1996, 1998) and López-Ornat (1997) found
that feminine nouns tended to be combined more frequently with the article la
(‘the_feminine.’) or the vowel-form a, whereas masculine nouns were preceded
(less frequently) by variable vocal forms and reached Brown’s 90% criterion later
than feminine nouns (Brown 1973). In both studies the authors attributed this imbal-
ance to the frequency, phonological consistency and redundancy of the feminine
form of the articles [‘una_indefinite, la_definite’] in Spanish, given that the vowel
‘-a’ in a final position is more salient than the consonants ‘-n’ and ‘-l’ of the mascu-
line form of articles [‘un_definite, el_definite’]. These researchers provided a con-
structivist explanation of these data without relying on an innate knowledge of
grammar or preformed linguistic categorial schemes.
The studies in Spanish mentioned above highlight another empirical phenome-
non that characterizes the early phases of language acquisition: the co-occurrence of
non-grammatical determiner omissions and the production of forms with different
proximity to the noun phrase structure (filler + Nincluded). For example, María, the
child in these studies, produced the same noun, pies [‘feet_masc pl’], in three dif-
ferent forms (apes, pes, epes) in the same session, at 19 months of age. In Mariscal
(1998), quantitative analysis showed that these variable productions constituted the
most frequent nominal type during the early phases. It was suggested that this vari-
ability, even though found in only one subject, could not be accounted for by rules
at any linguistic level.
Variability is, of course, a phenomenon found by different researchers, such as
Peters and Menn (1993) and López-Ornat (2003), but in our opinion it has not been
sufficiently operationalized and quantified. This was precisely one of the aims of
Mariscal (2009), to design a new measure for variability that could be added to the
traditional analyses of error and non-error patterns. For this study, the intra-
individual variability in children’s noun phrase utterances was analyzed. Participants
in this study were four middle-class Spanish children: two boys and two girls rang-
ing in ages from 22 to 25 months of age. The children were visited at their homes
twice a week for one month by the lead researcher, who had become well acquainted
with each child through previous visits to their school. Seven to nine recordings
were made during this one-month period, defined as a cycle. The first recording
consisted of spontaneous language produced during child–mother interactions in
free play situations. From the second to the last session the lead researcher inter-
acted with each child, using the same set of toys. Some toys were duplicated and
had different colors/sizes in order to elicit the production of adjectives and the quan-
tifier otro/a [‘another_masc/feminine], which is one of the earliest non-article
determiners produced by Spanish children. An adjective elicitation task, The Shop,
was developed, selecting objects with masculine and feminine nouns that repre-
sented prototypical and non-prototypical Spanish gender endings. Depending on
individual acquisition rates, one or two more cycles of data taking were used for the
children at three-month intervals. Orthographical transcriptions of the recording
sessions were made, given that Spanish spelling system bears an almost one-to-one
correspondence between phonetic and graphemic units. However, in order to tran-
scribe hard-to-identify segments, especially pre-noun elements that were difficult to
transcribe, two categories were defined: Precise Vowel, when it was any Spanish
normative vowel, and, ‘non-precise vowel’, when it was fuzzy or not adjusted to the
norms. A coding system following the CHILDES rules (MacWhinney 2000) was
developed, including a dependent tier (% cod) after every (pre) noun phrase produc-
tion. Table 3 displays the coding system and examples for each code.
Different kinds of analyses were carried out on the distribution and form of noun
phrase utterances, including variability profiles of nominal productions, and on gen-
der morphemes in adjectives, both in spontaneous and elicited uses. The general
pattern of noun phrase acquisition found was consistent with the one found by
Table 3 Coding system of noun phrase productions, determiners and examples in contexts of
obligatory use
*0N ‘pe’ instead of ‘el/un pez’ [the/a _masc fish]
0N ‘quiero agua’ [(I) need water] asking for water
vN ‘epe, ope, (a/e)pe’ for ‘el pez’ [the_masc fish]
ART + N ‘el pe’/ ‘the fish’ or ‘un pe’ [a_masc fish]
ODET ‘ete pe’/‘this fish’, ‘oto pe [another_masc fish]
? ‘te_tete’ for ‘el chupete [the_masc dummy]
‘este chupete [this_masc dummy]
0N ungrammatical omission of determiner, 0N the utterance includes a grammatical omission of
the determiner; vN the utterance includes a pronoun vowel, which can take different forms; ART +
N the utterance includes the adult form of a definite or indefinite article; ODET the utterance
includes the adult form of any other non-article determiner;? the utterance is an amalgam (non-
classifiable) or includes an ambiguous form
Mariscal (1996), and with other studies in Spanish (Aguirre 1995; López-Ornat
1997, 2003; Lleó 1997). A gradual decrease in ungrammatical emissions and the
early presence of vN productions was attested. Interestingly, subtle individual dif-
ferences or preferences for certain preN vowel forms, and imbalances dependent on
the gender of the noun, were found. Mariscal (1998) argued that they did not seem
compatible with a categorial definition of these linguistic units. Moreover, she pro-
posed that these differences could be explained by probabilistic or partial-kind
knowledge about formal and distributional properties of the particular process,
which are dependent on the acquisition trajectories of every child. Another impor-
tant piece of evidence, in favor of the partial-knowledge proposal, involves the vari-
ety of determiners used by children throughout the study. Although the percentage
of determiners used grew from cycle to cycle for every subject, only articles were
used from the beginning. Some other subtypes of determiners were used in the last
cycles but very infrequently. The early use of articles in child language could be
explained by means of frequency factors. However, even accepting this restriction,
if children had a syntactic category, the use of other subtypes of determiners could
be expected from earlier on. That is, formal knowledge about an individual subtype
of determiners should generalize to at least some other members of the category.
Why young children do not use possessive or demonstrative determiners while at
the same time these lexical forms, used as pronouns, are found in their language (for
example pointing to something, ‘ete, este/ this_masc’, or asking for more [oto /
another_masc])? It is precisely the generalization expected by the syntactic-like
type of knowledge of this category that is not found in the data (Mariscal 2009).
Regarding vowel + Noun units, these took only some of the properties of the
future D category. Mariscal (2009) considers the term ‘proto-article’ (Lleó 1997,
2001) appropriate for descriptive purposes, as long as it does not imply any kind of
system-wide syntactic category. In agreement with other authors (Peters and Menn
1993; Gerken 1996; López-Ornat 2003), Mariscal (2009) states that these vN utter-
ances could be explained by alluding to phonological bootstrapping processes
(Peters and Menn 1993; Gerken 1996; López-Ornat 1997, 2003) in the following
sense: children would first detect or perceive that certain sound, specially vowels,
tend to occur consistently before nouns she already knows. However given the pho-
nological weakness of these ‘future’ articles they cannot be analyzed nor stored as
proper words, nor form part of any syntactic category yet. But the consistent posi-
tion (i.e. segmental information) and their frequency could bootstrap the definition
and later constitution of a syntactic (D) category. Some noun exemplars are pro-
duced in ‘more grammatical’ structures (as vN, ART + N or ODET + N; see Table 3
for examples of these categories) than in others (*0 N; see Table 3 for examples).
Taking this variability as an index of partial grammatical (morphosyntactic) knowl-
edge, a decrease in variability was the expected phenomenon, and that is what is
reflected by the data as the grammar acquisition process advances. It was concluded
that inter-type variability could possibly be accounted for by a combination of lexi-
cal specificity effects, a fuzzy or partial knowledge (distributional and/or prosodic)
on what will constitute the Determiner category, and (only in some cases) by articu-
lation effects due to the length of utterance. In order to dissent angle this set of
variables, experimental designs would be necessary, although difficult to carry out

with young children.
For gender markers on adjectives, the results indicated a three-phase pattern of
acquisition: from non-analyzed productions of a few items to limited generalization,
coexisting with gender errors. By the end of the study errors were absent, except for
some over generalizations showing that children had learned the rule.
3.7 The Nominal Plural and its Development
Some studies have reported that the morphological plural appears later than gender
in nominal categories (Hernández-Pina 1984; Pérez-Pereira 1991). A more recent
study by Marrero and Aguirre (2003) proposed a three-stage phase, similar to the
general three-phase model proposed by López-Ornat, (López-Ornat 1995; López-
Ornat 1999) for bound morphology in Spanish. According to this model, the first
stage was characterized by the absence of functional plural, although some plural
forms do appear. In stage two, the emergence of the first plural opposition is
observed; at the beginning, the plural morpheme is indicated with only one marker
in all the utterances (eitherin the article los/las, or in the noun -s). It is the single
marker stage. In contrast, in stage three, the extension stage, markers are general-
ized, and the first nominal agreement relationships are established between deter-
miners and nouns or nouns and adjectives). Gradually, the generalization of marking
continues and some overgeneralization occurs, together with the first nominal-
verbal agreement. These stages may overalp and thus, are not discrete.
Marrero and Aguirre (2003) conducted a quantitative analysis of the greater part
of the Spanish CHILDES data base. The corpus is heterogeneous, a methodological
drawback; however, the authors concluded that there was evidence to support the
three-stage model explained above and showed that plural marking appears and is
generalized first in nominal classes, and later in adjectives and verbs.
3.8 Acquisition of Verb Morphology
The acquisition of verb morphology in Spanish, especially in the indicative mode,

is relatively well known. Since the 1980s there have been many researchers inter-
ested in the study of this part of the linguistic system. What follows is a selection of
some works and their results, but interested readers can find more information and
references in Alva-Canto (2014), Mariscal and Gallo (2015b), Marrero and Aguirre
(2003) and Serra et al. (2000).
Hernández-Pina’s (1984) longitudinal study of her son provided evidence on the
acquisition of verbal morphology that has been confirmed by subsequent research
(Bel 1996; Ezeizabarrena 1997; Fernández 1994; Gallo 1994). The third personal
singular in the present tense (indicative mode) is the first and most frequent verb
form produced by Spanish children. There is an important temporal lapse between
the production of the first verbal forms and their extended use to other roots. Also,
some person morphemes are produced earlier and more productively than others;
this is the case of singular and plural morphemes. Gathercole et al. (1999, 2002)
provided data from spontaneous speech regarding the acquisition of verbal number
morphology. Casla et al. (2005), using a quasi-experimental design, with 12 chil-
dren from 2;10 to 4;10 confirmed Gathercole et al.’s (1999) evidence. A recent study
by Aguado-Orea and Pine (2015) presents elegant and much more precise evidence
on early productivity regarding number opposition (singular vs. plural). These
authors tested the predictions of some current constructivist (e.g., Tomasello 2000;
Wilson 2003) and generativist accounts of the development of verb inflection
(Radford and Ploennig-Pacheco 1995; Wexler (1998), for example). They con-
ducted a detailed longitudinal study with two Spanish-speaking children between
the ages of 2;0 and 2;06. The constructivist claim that children’s early knowledge of
verb inflection is only partially productive, tested by comparing the average number
of different inflections per verb in matched samples of child and adult speech. The
generativist claim that children’s early use of verb inflection is essentially error-free,
tested by investigating the rate at which the children made subject-verb agreement
errors in different parts of the present tense paradigm. Although even adults’ use of
verb inflection in Spanish tends to look somewhat lexically restricted, the two chil-
dren’s use of verb inflection was significantly less flexible than that of their caregiv-
ers. In addition, although the rate at which the two children produced subject-verb
agreement errors in their speech was very low, this overall error rate hid a consistent
error pattern (i.e. error rates were substantially higher in low-frequency than in
high-frequency contexts and substantially higher for low-frequency than for high-
frequency verbs). Aguado-Orea and Pine (2015) concluded that the results obtained
undermined the claim that children’s use of verb inflection is fully productive from
the earliest observable stages, and are consistent with the constructivist claim that
knowledge of verb inflection develops only gradually.
3.9 Other Linguistic Categories
It is interesting to note that the first prepositions to appear are a and e’(‘to/at’ and
‘on/in’). The former is used in locative and intransitive constructions, as adults do;
but early in development an open vowel (a) appears in contexts where it is difficult
to know if it stands for the prepositions to or in, or even for the articles. For example,
María said a casa [to home] meaning en la casa [in the house], so it was difficult to
find what the vowel stands for, as it could stand for the preposition, the article or a
blending combination of both.
Personal pronouns and their syntactic consequences have been examined (Gallo
1992, 1994). Cross-sectional (Gallo 1992) and longitudinal data (Gallo 1994) iden-
tified the difficulties associated with the use of personal pronouns in simple Spanish
sentences. As a pro-drop language, the use of personal pronouns in sentences is not
compulsory; pronouns are used to give emphasis or for other pragmatic reasons. In
the longitudinal study, María produced the first personal pronoun in *Yo no a camita
[I do not (missing verb) to bed] (1;10); two months later she said *Yo talta (tarta) [I
(missing verb) cake] (2;0). María correctly inserted the pronoun, but omitted the
verb in both utterances; on other occasions, she included the verb, but with errors
affecting person morphemes. In yo a sentá (=sentar [sit]) and yo abí (=abrir [open])
la pelta (=puerta [door]) (both produced at 2;0) she uses impersonal verbal forms,
while in *yo sabe [I knows] and *no tene agua yo [doesn’t have water I], she made
an erroneous use of third person verbal morpheme instead of first. In the cross-
sectional study, Gallo (1992) developed an experimental task for use with children
2;6, 3;0 and 3;6, who were asked to transmit a message – spoken by the researcher –
to another adult – a research assistant – while doing some interesting activities (e.g.,
painting, dressing up and playing with a ball). In doing so, the children would
ideally change person agreement of the sentences to be transmited and include,
although optionally, personal pronouns. So, for example, if the main research said:
(7) Dile que soy un payasito

soy:_1st person_sg
[Tell her I am a little clown]
Dile que yo tengo una pelota
yo:_personal pronoun _1st person / tengo: _1st person
[Tell her I have a ball]
She would have to say:
(8) Es un payasito
(ella):_3rd person _personal pronoun 3rdsg_optional
[She is a little clown]
Tiene una pelota
(ella): personal pronoun 3rdsg_optional / tiene:_3rd person
[She has a ball]
Table 4 Model proposed to explain the acquisition of person agreement in Spanish verbs
Phase 1 (2;06) Phase 2 (3;00) Phase 3 (3;06)
No pronoun use Pronoun use and morphological Correct productions and
errors (no person change) optional pronoun inclusion
Examples
A: ‘Dile que YO voy_1st A: ‘Dile que YO tengo_1st person A: ‘Dile que TÚ eres_2nd
person a pintar un osito’ una pelota’ person un payaso’
[Tell (her) that I will [Tell (her) that I have a ball] [Tell (her) that YOU are a
draw a bear] clown]
C: ‘Va_3rd person a C: ‘Yo_1st person tengo una C: ‘Yo soy_1st person un
pintar’ pelota’ payaso, soy un payaso’
[(She)will draw] [I have a ball] (instead of) [I am a clown, (I) am a clown]
SHE_3rd person has a ball’)
Gallo (1992, 1994)
A adult, C child
Gallo found that the structure VsO appeared earlier in the data than SVO, and
was more frequent in children’s productions. She proposed a three-phase model of
the acquisition of person agreement in the Spanish verbal system (see Table 4).
Longitudinal data (Gallo 1994) also seemed compatible with this model. More
recently, Mariscal and Gallo (2015b) suggested that the difficulties shown in the
acquisition could be taken as an indication of the underlying learning processes;
specifically, the use of procedural skills and their application to the problem of ver-
bal agreement in Spanish, a process that takes more time than gender agreement
acquisition, at least one more year.
Spanish morphology also includes derivation and many other interesting struc-
tures (tense morphology and agreement, verbal aspect, the use of subjunctive, etc.).
Due to space constraints we cannot review studies on them, although there are not
too many. However, we cannot but help to include this nice example of an interac-
tion between María (3;08) and her father, showing how proficient she became as a
‘little linguist’. This example is important because it demonstrates how salient deri-
vational morphology is since early years of language development.
(9) [P = padre (father); N = niña (girl)]

P: ¿Qué quiere decir granja? P: What is a farm?
N: Granja para. . par. . para el granjero. N: Farm for... fo…for
the farmer.
P: ¡Ah! Granja para el granjero, ¿no? P: Oh! Farm for the farmer,
right?
N: Sí. N: Yes.
P: ¿Cómo se llama el que tiene caballos? P: How do we call the man
with horses?
N: Caballero. N: Horse man.
P: ¿Y el que tiene pescados? P: And the man with fish?
N: Pescadero. N: Fisher man
P: ¿Y el que tiene libros? P: And the man with books?
N: Libradero. N: Book man.
P: ¿Y el que tiene monos? P: And the man with
monkeys?
N: Monero. N: Monkey man.
P: ¿Y el que tiene frutas? P: And the man with fruit?
N: Frutero. N: Fruit man.
P: ¿Y el que tiene carne? P: And the man with meat?
N: Carnero [se ríen]. N: Meat man [they laugh].
P: ¿Y el que tiene pesetas? P: And the one with pesetas?
N: Pesetero. N: Peseta man.
P: Ahí, ahí [se ríen]. P: There, there [they laugh].
Although neither of the words produced by the child are used in Spanish with an
agentive meaning, she has deduced that the agentive morpheme –ero [−er] is pro-
ductive and very useful for creating novel nouns. The use of overregularizations in
different languages has been shown to be correlated with lexical growth since chil-
dren are young (Auza 2008; Ravid et al. 2003). This example shows us how produc-
tive derivational morphology is and how overregularizations play an important role
for the expansion of vocabulary, not only at this early stage of lexical growth, but in
the school years, a period in which derivational morphology is still productive
in helping children deduce lexical information.
3.10 Syntactic Development
A big cognitive step is achieved when children start combining words. Although the
combination of two words may look simple, the emergence of syntax is born, usu-
ally between 18 and 24 months, given that the first relations between concepts take
place. Consider the next example:
(10) Papá casa

(produced by Anne, at 1;11)
[Father (arrived) home]
While it might look as a simple fusion of two nouns, what is really relevant is the
function that is established when two words are combined. Young children are able
to put functions together because a word like casa [home], is more than a label for
an object; it is used as a ‘locative’ word. These types of combinations will take place
based on the frequency of word combinations that children listen in everyday con-
versations, from where they obtain the most basic patterns of early syntactic struc-
tures (Rojas-Nieto 2009).
The preschool years constitute a period in which the basis for complex syntax is
settled down. In this section we will mainly focus on this period, as it is the most
studied.
3.10.1 Word Order
In Spanish, as we mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, the most common word
order is SVO. Children’s first sentences follow this structure but other orders also
appear. For example:
(11) María ta durmiendo e nene, ¿Qué vas a hacer tú?, Ahora te los lavo
(produced by María, at 2;00).
[Maria’s lulling ´e baby, What are you going to do? Now, I wash them you]
In relation to other simple sentences, early questions are marked by intonation

alone for yes/no forms and by reduced versions of qu-words (wh-words). The com-
monest qu-questions are qué (what) and quién (who), but their form is not always
equivalent to the adult’s. Early negative both in Spanish and Catalan (Bel 1996)
appear both post-verbally and pre-preverbally, although with the emergence of mor-
phology, children learn to place them before the verb. Bel (1996) argued that her
findings support the presence of functional categories in the grammar of Catalan
and Spanish children from the earliest syntactic manifestations. However, the data
might be easily interpreted in constructivist terms, considering frequency and posi-
tional variables which help children to build up the knowledge needed to master
word order related to negative sentences in Spanish.
3.10.2 Complex Syntax
Once that simple sentences containing only a verb are produced correctly by chil-
dren about the age of 2;6, first complex clauses appear (see Serra et al. 2000; Chap.
7). Coordinate clauses at an early stage are either juxtaposed with no conjunction or
joined by y [and], both frequent kinds of sentences produced in narrative contexts.
Spanish-speaking children use simple juxtaposition to express causes, conditions,
purposes and sequences, omitting any conjunction that might help specify the
intended grammatical relationship more precisely. The first complement clauses
produced, as in English, tend to be those that follow verbs like querer [want], with
a third or first person introduced by conjunctions like que‘that’. The first subordi-
nate conjunctions – porque, si, cuando [because, if, when] – appear later on, between
the ages of 3 and 5, but children make a variety of errors, such as when using tem-
poral conjunctions. For example:
(12) Addressing her toy, María (age 2;08) said:

‘A la calle. Cuando te ~ cuando te lo *tomas te doy un poco de café.
Porque si no te lo tomas no vas a la calle. Toma a ti poco te he echado
(possible, but uncommon word order) porque tú estás mailto.
Tú estás mailto y a ti te he echado poco (common word order). Tómatelo’.
[To the street.When you ~ when you drink it I (will) give you some coffee.
Because if you don’t drink it you won’t go to the street. Here, a little
I have poured for you (possible, but uncommon word order) because
you are a little sick. You are sick and I have poured some (milk)
(common word order). Drink it].
Within the preschool years, children develop language abilities, includying syn-
tax, for telling everyday life experiences, storytelling or maintaining a conversation.
These language experiences promote children to make changes in the production of
lexical and syntactic patterns (Botting 2002; Gillam and Johnston 1992). Syntactic
complexity, where coordination and subordination play an important role, has been
a useful index for evaluating language development (Justice et al. 2006). Coordinate
constructions appear early on preschool years (Serra et al. 2000) and are usually
more frequent and less complex than subordinate constructions. Many coordinate
conjunctions that are frequent do have different functions and sometimes, not con-
ventional. Consider the next example on story-telling:
(13) El ratón le pidió una escoba y no quería barrer (age 3;10)

[The mouse asked him for a broom and_Copulative conjunction didn’t
want to sweep]
(14) El ratón le pidió una escoba pero no quería barrer

[The mouse asked him for a broom but_
Adversative conjunction didn’t want to sweep]
As we can observe y [ and ] in (13) not necessarily represents a copulative con-

junction. It has been used in a non-conventional way to address an adversative func-
tion, as compared to a more conventional sentence found in (14). These and other
coordinate conjunctions, such as disyunctives, subordinate conjunctions like rela-
tives (que_Subject and Object) and adverbials (para_final, entonces_consecutive,
porque_causative, como_causative, si_conditional, donde_ locative, tanto_modal)
have been observed in spontaneous conversations and also when children are
encouraged to tell stories (Alarcón and Auza 2015).
(15) El ratón quería que (el niño) le leyera un cuento (age 4;03)
[The mouse wanted that _Relative conjunction (the boy) read him
a story-book]
The use of these and other conjunctions such as aunque [although] may result in
syntactic errors until relatively late in development (8 years!); for example, cases
where the verb is used in the indicative instead of the subjunctive mode (Serra et al.
2000), as in ‘aunque tú no quieres venir, yo me voy’ instead of ‘aunque tú no quieras
venir, yo me voy’ [although you do_subjunctive not want to come I go].
3.10.3 Latest Morphosyntactic Acquisition
During preschool and even the school-age, certain quantifiers and some functions of
determiners are still under acquisition. For example, the variety of semantic func-
tions that definite articles play in nominal phrases (e.g. part-of-a-whole: la cabeza
[the head]; social roles: la doctora [the doctor] uniqueness: la luna [the moon])
gives place to errors in how they are used. At these ages, children can still omit or
substitute articles showing us that the selection of these particles is dynamic,
content-dependent of the noun they accompany and constrained by the communica-
tive context (Auza 2011). Later acquisitions include some of the compound tenses
for talking about the recent me he comprado un lápiz [I have bought a pencil] ver-
sus the remote past me compré un lápiz [I bought a pencil]; the conditional and
subjunctive moods, complements and subordinate clauses requiring the subjunctive,
certain quantifiers and some functions of articles, and some types of relative clauses.
The development of subject and object relative clauses has been considered an
index of syntactic complexity. While relative clauses appear early on in Spanish
language acquisition, they still experience changes beyond 9 years of age. Different
structural types of relative clauses continue to be fully mastered until high-school
(Aparici et al. 2016). Full mastery of the different word orders required with direct
and indirect object clitic pronouns is attested fairly late (Shin & Requena, this vol-
ume; Torrens and Escobar 2006). Other linguistic sub-systems that appear to be
acquired later on are counterfactual. Children as old as 11 years of age make errors
using, for example, conditional verbs instead of the periphrastic imperfect subjunc-
tive in the ‘if’ clause. That is the case of si habría hecho… [If I had done…] instead
of [If I would’ve done…]. Future research about other grammatical forms will prob-
ably reveal other productions that are still in progress in later Spanish language
development and other Romance languages.
The overall Spanish language acquisition timeline depicted here show similari-
ties and differences as compared to English and other Romance languages.
Similarities might be attributed to the fact that cognitive development and its mech-
anisms constitute a major determinant of some complex aspects of language acqui-
sition. Other similarities might be the consequence of typological familiarity
between languages. For instance, the sequence of acquisition about temporal terms
using tense and aspect in verbs shows strong parallels across French, English and
German. The differences can often be attributed to the typological characteristics of
the language and its specific complexity. For example, Spanish, with number and
gender inflections, is simpler than Polish and other languages which also inflect
case, but it is more complex than English (see Slobin 1985). Some other differences
might be attributed to cultural and socioeconomic status. These differences exert an
influence on the process of acquisition.
In sum, a number of aspects of Spanish Language development has been revised.
Other aspects such as complex syntax remain unexamined, particularly in the area
of later language development. Few experimental studies have been done in the
field. However, new high-standard research is needed in order to gain more knowl-
edge about language acquisition in Spanish-speaking children. This knowledge will
help researchers to better understand the complexity of Spanish, but also to estab-
lish the bases for comparing the process of language acquisition in children with
language difficulties.
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Typical Language Development

of Monolingual Spanish-Speaking Children

Abstract This chapter aims at reviewing the process of acquisition of Spanish as a

Keywords Monolinguals • Spanish-speaking children • Phonology • Morphology

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017 3

In 1979 Karmiloff-Smith, a young Karmiloff-Smith, a former student of Piaget’s,

2.1 Word Order and Pronoun Dropping

(1) Pablo da la pelota a María vs. Pablo se la da

(2) María: Cálsotee. Cáso, papa. Pongo sapatitos.

Another consequence of a verb-rich morphology is that word order is much freer

2.2 Noun Morphology and Agreement

(3) la silla es blanca vs. las sillas son blancas

2.3 Sentence Type Constructions

(4) Si yo fuera una mujer rica, viajaría alrededor del mundo

Or the relative sentences:

(6) Quiero que vengas el martes

The subjunctive is also compulsory in negative imperative sentences. Thus, in

2.4 Verb System

3 Spanish Language Acquisition

3.1 Early Phonological Development

Table 2 Miguel’s first words Form Meaning and situation

segmentation in infants acquiring syllable-timed languages, such as Spanish or

3.2 Early Lexical Development

AGE mos. Understands

developmental trends of morphological development in Spanish by referring to rel-

3.4 Comprehending Words and Morphemes in Spanish

on phono-morphological gender clues present in the adjectives used during the

3.5 Acquisition of Spanish Morphology: Production Studies

The acquisition of Spanish free-standing morphemes, specifically their production,

In Romance languages, the criteria for establishing morphological productivity

3.6 The Acquisition Process for Spanish Gender Agreement

In spite of its level of abstraction, gender agreement is a linguistic subsystem that

variables, experimental designs would be necessary, although difficult to carry out

3.7 The Nominal Plural and its Development

3.8 Acquisition of Verb Morphology

The acquisition of verb morphology in Spanish, especially in the indicative mode,

3.9 Other Linguistic Categories

(7) Dile que soy un payasito

She would have to say:

(9) [P = padre (father); N = niña (girl)]

3.10 Syntactic Development

(10) Papá casa

3.10.1 Word Order

In relation to other simple sentences, early questions are marked by intonation

3.10.2 Complex Syntax

(12) Addressing her toy, María (age 2;08) said:

(13) El ratón le pidió una escoba y no quería barrer (age 3;10)

(14) El ratón le pidió una escoba pero no quería barrer

As we can observe y [ and ] in (13) not necessarily represents a copulative con-

3.10.3 Latest Morphosyntactic Acquisition

Velázquez & I. Rodríguez (Eds.), Estudios de Lingüística Funcional (pp. 223–251). Querétaro:

López-Ornat, S. (1995). La adquisición gramatical: Un esquema. In S. López-Ornat, A. Fernández,

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2.1 Word Order and Pronoun Dropping

2.2 Noun Morphology and Agreement

2.3 Sentence Type Constructions

2.4 Verb System

3 Spanish Language Acquisition

3.1 Early Phonological Development

3.2 Early Lexical Development

3.4 Comprehending Words and Morphemes in Spanish

3.5 Acquisition of Spanish Morphology: Production Studies

3.6 The Acquisition Process for Spanish Gender Agreement

3.7 The Nominal Plural and its Development

3.8 Acquisition of Verb Morphology

3.9 Other Linguistic Categories

3.10 Syntactic Development

3.10.1 Word Order

3.10.2 Complex Syntax

3.10.3 Latest Morphosyntactic Acquisition