The Acquisition of Spanish Morphosyntax: The L1/L2 Connection

Developments in linguistic theory, as well as the growing body of evidence from languages other than English, provide new opportunities for deeper explorations into how language is represented in the mind of learners. This collection of new empirical studies on the acquisition of Spanish morphosyntax specifically contributes to the characterization of the L1 / L2 connection in acquisition. Using L1 and L2 Spanish data from children and adults, the authors seek to address the central questions that have occupied developmental psycholinguists in the final decades of the 20th century and that will no doubt continue engaging them in the future. From the perspective of minimalism, the various studies in this volume investigate both the type of mental representations that can account for optionality as a trait of emergent grammars, as well as the role of morphology as a trigger for the acquisition of syntax across a variety of aspects of the developing grammar: the morphosyntax of nouns, verbs, pronominal clitics and compounds.