The emergence of CP in child Basque

In the present study, I investigate the acquisition of CP-related structures in Basque by one monolingual child and two Basque-Spanish bilingual children aged 1;05–3;00. The aim of this study is to determine whether there is evidence in the child data supporting a fine-structured CP for Basque, as proposed by Ortiz de Urbina (1999a, 2008). For that purpose, I have looked at time of emergence of CP-related structures, following Grinstead & Elizondo’s (2001) work on this topic. Assuming a richly articulated CP, the data available on the left periphery so far is compatible with the Full Competence Hypothesis (cf. Poeppel & Wexler 1993, among others) and with the Structure Building Hypothesis (Guilfoyle & Noonan 1992). Incremental acquisition for the latter implies that the CP field is built incrementally, possibly one layer at a time. This is, however, not clearly suggested by the data.