Acquiring verbs in Spanish: An evaluation of two proposals

The objective of the present study focuses on exploring two proposals about the acquisition of the grammatical category of verb. On the one hand, the study aims at analyzing whether the acquisition of a given mass of verbal lexical items occurs before the emergence of productive verbal morphology. On the other hand, the study also explores the possibility that the acquisition of negative structures emerges before productive verbal morphology as well. The study presents longitudinal data based on the linguistic production of a monolingual Spanish-speaking girl at the age of 19 to 27 months. These data show that the amount of verbal vocabulary is a good indicator of productivity as far as verbal morphology is concerned, but such vocabulary development occurs simultaneous to morphological development. The data also show that the learning and productive use of negation occurs before productivity in verbal morphology. These results are discussed in connection to the approach that claims that distributional analysis is a good mechanism for the acquisition of grammatical categories.