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There is no evidence for a ‘no overt subject’ stage in early child Spanish: a note on Grinstead (2000)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2002
Abstract
Grinstead (2000) argues that there is a stage in both Spanish and Catalan children's grammatical development when they are restricted to using verbs without overt subjects. However, the evidence for a ‘no overt subject’ stage in early child Spanish is based on very thin data from a single child: Juan between the ages of 1;7 and 2;1. In the present note we reanalyse the data from Juan and compare it with data from another child María at 1;7 and 1;8. Our results show that Juan produces his first overt subject during the same session as his first non-imperative verb form, and that María produces a relatively high proportion of verbs with overt subjects in both of her first two transcripts. They thus provide no support for the claim that there is a ‘no overt subject’ stage in early child Spanish.
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- © 2002 Cambridge University Press
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