There is no evidence for a ‘no overt subject’ stage in early child Spanish: a note on Grinstead (2000)

• Published in: Journal of child language Vol. 29; no. 4; pp. 865 - 874
• Main Authors: AGUADO-OREA, JAVIER, PINE, JULIAN M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.11.2002
• Subjects: Acquisition; Catalan language; Child Language; Child, Preschool; Children; Children & youth; Comparative studies; Female; Grammar; Grammatical subject; Humans; Infant; Infants; Language; Language Acquisition; Male; Notes and Discussion; Preschool children; Recording sessions; Researchers; Spanish; Spanish language; Spanish Speaking; Speaking; Speech; Speech Intelligibility; Subject; Verbs; United Kingdom > UK
• ISSN: 0305-0009; 1469-7602
• DOI: 10.1017/S0305000902005263

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.