This volume includes a selection of papers that address a wide range of acquisition phenomena from different Romance languages and all share a common theoretical approach based on the Principles and Parameters theory. They favour, discuss and sometimes challenge traditional explanations of first… read more
This study examines empirical data from Spanish and Catalan children with SLI and argues in favor of the grammatical agreement deficit hypothesis (Clahsen 1989, 1991; Clahsen et al. 1997). Following Chomsky’s (1995) system of morphosyntactic features in terms of interpretability, we will assume… read more
This chapter deals with experimental research on Spanish children’s interpretation of universal quantifiers. A potentially difficult asymmetry is highlighted: quantifiers in preverbal or postverbal position in contexts of Clitic Left Dislocation. We show that five-year-olds easily obtain the wide… read more
We present evidence that children have difficulty with the Spanish psych verbs that do not project the subject as the external argument. Our findings support the External Argument Requirement Hypothesis (EARH), according to which children until 5 or more have trouble with base structures that don’t… read more
Within the experimental tradition of the study of acquisition of pronouns, one major aim has been to test whether binding principles are innate. Most findings support the claim that whether binding is innate, pragmatic notions like ‘point of view’ or ‘discourse-context’, which are related to free… read more
