Comprehension of Prototypical Tense and Aspect Combinations in Child Spanish

Abstract

Both children and adults tend to produce predicates with lexical aspect, grammatical aspect and tense in particular prototypical combinations. While it has been argued that these prototypes constitute the linguistic knowledge that children have of tense, others argue that they are independent dimensions of knowledge, even in child language, and that the prototypical groupings of these dimensions in child language fall together for non-linguistic cognitive reasons. Recent studies of child Spanish suggest non-adult-like use of verb finiteness. In light of these facts, we seek to determine whether Spanish-speaking children are also delayed in their comprehension of prototypical tense and aspect combinations. Twenty-three Spanish-speaking children (mean age = 3;10) from Mexico City were given a comprehension task and scored on their ability to select a picture corresponding to different tense-aspect combinations. Children were largely able to successfully interpret tense and aspect information as it was conveyed in the adult-like cues.