Functional categories in Spanish-speaking children's grammars: Acquisition of tense, agreement, and case-marking

Recent research has proposed various accounts of the acquisition of Inflectional Phrase (IP) in early multiword sentence construction. Radford (1990) claims that children's earliest multiword utterances totally lack IP features while Hyams claims that children use IP projections from the outset of multiword sentence construction (Hyams, 1994). This study examined whether Spanish-speaking children in their earliest sentence construction stage lack IP in their grammar, and whether there is an order of acquisition of IP features. Nine Puerto Rican Spanish-speaking children whose ages ranged from 23 to 29 months participated in this study. All the participants came from households in which Spanish was the language spoken at home and had a history of normal language and hearing development as determined by the results of parental interviews and by the data obtained from the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories, Spanish version (Jackson, Bates, and Thal; 1992). Four elicitation tasks were used to obligate the use of pronouns, tense, and agreement verb marking. A language sample was collected from each subject. The language development of the children was observed simultaneously for a period of three months. Each task was presented each month to the nine subjects. Results of this investigation appear to provide more support to Hyam's hypothesis because the subjects in the earliest stage of sentence construction produced some utterances that contained verb phrases that projected IP information. Findings of this study support the hypothesis that there was a specific order to the acquisition of the grammatical features learned by the subjects examined: tense, person, case, and number.