The Acquisition of the English Auxiliary by Native Spanish Speakers

This paper describes the appearance of English auxiliaries in the speech of five native speakers of Spanish (two children, two adolescents, one adult). In addition, it also describes these subjects' acquisition of the negative and interrogative transformations. The acquisition of the negative transformation showed the following developmental pattern. The subjects began negating by using no + verb constructions (e.g. He no can play baseball). Then either simultaneously or shortly afterwards, they began using don't + verb constructions (e.g. I don't can explain). Next they acquired constructions in which the negative was placed after the auxiliaries is and can (e.g. He can't go). Finally, they learned the analyzed forms of don't (do not, doesn't, does not, didn't, did not). The analysis of the interrogatives indicated that both YIN and whquestions appear in the untransposed form, but there is no stage in which the untransposed form is consistently prior to the transposed. There is also no stage in which transposed YIN-questions precede transposed whquestions or vice-versa. In general, however, transposition is more frequent in whquestions. The results of the auxiliary analysis indicate that is copula appears first and that can and do appear shortly afterwards. Beyond these three auxiliaries the order of appearance for each subject is highly variable. This result contrasts with recent work on the acquisition of certain English morphemes which shows an invariant order of acquisition.