Constraint conflict in the acquisition of clusters in Spanish

This study characterizes the cluster production patterns of four Spanish-speaking children, whose data are drawn from original and published research. Each child demonstrates a different pattern of production. The data support previous claims that there is a general preference for “sonority-based onset selection” cross-linguistically; this is explained via an appeal to independently motivated syllable structure markedness constraints. Divergence from the sonority pattern also occurs within and across the children’s systems, which also has been observed in previous research. The asymmetries between cluster types are accounted for by appealing to independently motivated segmental markedness and faithfulness constraints. Taken together, the constraint interactions make testable predictions for different typologies of developing and fully-developed grammars.