| This study analyzes four aspects of the acquisition of Spanish verb inflective morphemes by two Spanish English bilingual children who received different amounts of input in Spanish between the ages of 2;9 and 3;3. The children were recorded bimonthly while having naturalistic conversations with the researcher, their caregivers and other children and also while completing two types of elicitation tasks. The results indicate that the two children, one a Spanish-dominant bilingual and the other one a more balanced bilingual, produced similar percentages of expected verb inflective morphemes. Also, the children produced correctly in a similar percentage Spanish forms for which language transfer from English was possible and forms for which that transfer was not available. This indicates that the difference in the amount of Spanish input the children received did not affect their performance with respect to the percentage of expected forms produced. The analysis of the markedness values of verbal inflective morphemes indicates that when the children did not produce an expected verbal morpheme, they tended to replace it with a less marked form. The results also support the Relative Defective Tense Hypothesis (Andersen and Shirai 1994, 1996) that proposes that in the initial stages of language acquisition, children tend to associate inflective verb morphology with the lexical aspect of verbs. It was found that children associated the Preterite with accomplishment and achievement verbs, the Imperfect Indicative with state verbs, and progressive forms with activity verbs. Finally, the analysis supports the hypothesis proposed by Gathercole et al. (1999, 2000) that verb inflections are acquired on a verb-by-verb basis. |
