ŞOIMAN LIVIA NICOLETA

Master Engleză, Anul I

RESEARCH ON THE ACQUISITION OF SPANISH

Two volumes which comprise Contemporary Perspectives on the

Acquisition of Spanish are the research on the aquisition of Spanish were
made by the linguists Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux and William R. Glass.
I present some of their ideas concerning problemst that Spanish rised.
As a pro-drop and clitic language, Spanish provides an exciting
empirical ground for acquisition research. To illustrate, within principles
and parameters research, one of the best studied parameters in acquisition
is the null subject or pro-drop parameter. However, the adult acquisition
of a non-null subject language (e.g.: English) by learners from a null
subject native background (e.g.: Spanish) has been dealt with in hundreds
of studies, while the bibliography on parameter resetting in the opposite
direction is limited to little more than two dozen articles. The reason for
the difference is demographic, but the trends are changing, with a
consequent enrichment in empirical perspectives.
Assessments of research on Child Spanish (L1)
The accumulation of data in Volume I was insufficient to enable a
comprehensive characterization of developmental sequences, but had an
important contributions to the utilization of some of the new sources of
spontaneous production data in Child Spanish. The sections on second
language (L2) acquisition in both volumes also offer important
methodological and empirical contributions to the dialogue on the
acquisition of Spanish. In particular, some chapters extend the empirical
scope of research in the field.
Fifteen years ago researchers' beliefs about children's language
development were determined primarily by their views on language
(Elliot 1981). In other words, theories of language acquisition were
subordinate to the different approaches to the study of language. Today
the relationship between linguistic theory and acquisition data has shifted.
The question of how languages are acquired is considered by many to be
the central question of linguistic theory (Chomsky and Lasnik 1993,
Bloom 1994). Not only are acquisition data an important test for the
predictions of a given theory, but theories of language are also evaluated
on the basis of their potential for explaining language acquisition.
The study of first and second language acquisition evolved separately, the

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former as a sub-field of developmental psychology, the latter under the
auspices of language pedagogy. Today, these areas fall within a broader
research agenda that investigates the question of what is similar in adult
and child language learning processes and why. These two volumes, like
acquisition research in general, do not constitute a single, unified body of
work devoted to answering this question. Instead, various disciplinary
and theoretical approaches to acquisition are represented here as they
apply to Spanish.
Linguists, psychologists, and caregivers wonder at the ease with which
young children learn their mother tongue. By the end of their second year
of life, children have the phonological system of their language in place.
By a gradual process the lexical, morphological, and syntactic system of
the target language is built, and by the time children reach elementary
school they possess a grammatical system as sophisticated as that of their
parents. In the process of acquiring language, children do not blindly
imitate their parents’language. Instead, they appear to follow their own
internal grammar. The following dialogue between Rafael, aged 30
months, and his mother illustrates this independence from explicit
feedback.
madre: ¿Cómo se dice? “Yo he escrito.”
Rafael: Yo ha scribido
madre: No hombre, se dice “Yo he escrito.”
Rafael: No. Yo ha’cribido
[...]
Rafael: No, papá ya ha cribido. Papá ha escrito. Yo
ha cribido. Yo no he escrito, he ascribido.
madre: ¡No hombre! No se dice “ascribido”.
Rafael: Sí se dice “he ascribido”.
madre: ¡Ah!, bueno, pues sí.
(Hernández-Pina 1984: 288)
Clearly, Rafael’s knowledge of the grammatical structure of Spanish is at
odds with his mother’s. Children follow precise developmental steps in
their acquisition of the morphology (López-Ornat, Volume 1), and the
syntax (Ezeizabarrena, Volume 1).
What is the nature of children’s knowlege of language? What
mechanisms guide and constrain this process? Traditionally, acquisition
research has been defined by the tension between the nativist and the
empiricist paradigms, which in recent years has shifted to a debate
between generativist and connectionist models (Plunkett 1995). Both
positions are represented in the works in Volume 1, although most
chapters assume the parameter setting model advocated by generative
grammar. According to this theory, differences between the various
human languages are defined by a small set of parametric decisions

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(Chomsky 1981, Hyams 1986, Meisel 1995). The learner is believed to
possess knowledge of all the universal properties of language (the
principles), and language acquisition is considered a process of finding
which setting of the parameters correspond to the target language. The
study of early syntax often reveals that children have early knowledge of
the parametric options of their parents' language, in particular in the case
of the pro-drop parameter (Valian 1991, Austin et al. Volume 1).
In bilingual acquisition the fundamental question is how children manage
the simultaneous learning of parametric differences in their two
languages (Meisel 1994, Barreña Volume 1, Gathercole and Montes
Volume 1).
In the area of adult grammatical development, the primary research
question regards the possibility of learning new parameter settings in
adulthood. Two important research paradigms in the field have proved
fruitful. The first of these paradigms considers the notion that
grammatical knowledge of the second language is initially mediated by
the native language in adult learners. To test this view, some studies
examine the structure of the initial stages in L2 acquisition (Liceras et al.
Volume 1). Others compare developmental patterns in adult and child
acquisition (Schwartz 1992, González Volume 1). The second paradigm
aims to show that reliance on (or “access to”) grammatical knowledge
based on Universal Grammar is present in adult grammatical acquisition
(Flynn 1987, Flynn and O'Neil 1988, White 1989). This research is often
approached using the strategy of identifying aspects of the grammar that
are untaught (or taught in a misleading fashion) and then testing adult
learners’knowledge of such aspects of the grammar (Pérez-Leroux and
Glass Volume 1, Montrul Volume 1, Bruhn de Garavito Volume 1).
Second language development is studied via learners' language
production and comprehension. However, several researchers have been
intrigued by the role of production and comprehension in the acquisition
process itself, issues explored at greater length in Volume 2. For example,
questions which have been raised during the last 15 years include: does
output play a role in the internalization of a developing grammatical
system, and what is the role of input processing in acquisition and what
do learners attend to in the stream of input data?
In the last two decades, researchers have come to view language
production (output) as something more than just the by-product of
acquisition. Indeed, many have argued for its recognition as a
contributing variable in the acquisition process itself. This has been
perhaps most evident in Swain's well-known publication which, in
response to the tremendous attention that “comprehensible input” was
receiving in the literature, suggested a role for “comprehensible output”
(Swain 1985). As Swain argued, production may move learners from

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semantic processing to syntactic processing, ultimately resulting in a
more native-like grammar. A role for output has also been seen in the
writings of researchers working within Vygotskyan frameworks (Lantolf
Volume 2) and their investigation of learners’private language play. In
fact, Vygotskyan theory as applied to second language development has
garnered increased attention in recent years. According to this
perspective, the self-directed private speech that a learner engages in has
a central role in language development.
Language production research also examines learners’phonetic ability
and their pronunciation. Specifically, variables affecting the acquisition
of a target language's phonetic system such as formal instruction and
learners’ability to mimic non-L1 sounds have piqued the curiosity of
some researchers.
Despite the growing interest in output and language production in recent
years, perhaps nothing has captivated the second language dialogue as
much as the attention placed on the role of input and interaction. Tracing
its contemporary origins to the late 1960s when Corder (1967) first
distinguished input from intake (i.e., a subset of input data which is
”taken in” by the learner), (comprehensible) input has become a central
component in various acquisition theories and has even been the focus of
an entire volume of acquisition research. While approaches favoring the
primacy of input are somewhat at odds with theories that emphasize the
innateness of language (e.g., Universal Grammar), they are not
completely incompatible. Moreover, while many researchers concur that
input plays a significant role in acquisition, questions regarding the
processing of input remain to be answered. That is to say, it is not fully
understood which features in a stream of input data receive the learners'
attention and why, thus encouraging investigations along these lines
(Barcroft and VanPatten Volume 2).
Volume 1 is devoted to the acquisition of syntax by both children and
adults. The first section of Volume 1 presents research on the grammar of
child Spanish in both monolingual and multilingual settings.
The second section of Volume 1 investigates the nature of developing
grammars from a second language perspective, with attention to the roles
of the first language and of universal principles.
Volume 2 is devoted to issues of production, processing and
comprehension by non-native speakers of Spanish. The first section of
Volume 2 examines L2 production, looking both at oral and written
language. The second section of Volume 2 investigates issues related to
L2 processing and comprehension of written and oral input.