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Hispanic Linguistics at the Crossroads: Theoretical linguistics, language acquisition and language contactEdited by Rachel Klassen, Juana M. Liceras and Elena Valenzuela
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 4] 2015
► pp. 145–168
Edited by Rachel Klassen, Juana M. Liceras and Elena Valenzuela
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 4] 2015
► pp. 145–168
The sum is more than its parts
Acquisition of clitic clusters in Spanish
We analyze all instances of potential or realized Spanish clitic clusters in the María and Emilio corpora from CHILDES from the ages of 1;09 to 3;00. After a brief stage in which they are completely absent, clusters are produced in target contexts at adult rates. Percentage of realization was the lowest for dative/accusatives, by far the most frequent cluster construction. Clusters produced exhibit extremely low error rates, contain no illicit feature combination, and appropriate repair strategies (spurious se) are employed. There is no evidence of systematic gaps in the paradigm, as their uses approximate adult patterns.
Keywords: clitic clusters, Spanish, Spanish L1 acquisition
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