Developing first contrasts in Spanish verb inflection

This paper offers evidence of the strong parallelism between mother and child usage for exemplars of verb forms. Both mother and child usage reveal little inflectional productivity, a highly skewed distribution of inflection forms, and item-based frequency for specific inflectional forms. The contrasting forms of a verb depend on how that verb is ‘modeled’ in maternal speech. Mother and child uses of inflected forms show small clusters of verbs marked by the same inflectional contrasts. This emergent organization does not necessarily point to depend on abstract guiding principles or on the underlying semantics of verbs. Rather they direct attention to the pragmatic functions and syntactic constructions where particular verb-inflection combinations occur. Keywords: Exemplars; Verb inflection contrasts; Spanish acquisition