The early acquisition of Spanish verbal morphology: Across-the-board or piecemeal knowledge?

This paper examines the earliest uses of verbal morphology in aninflectional language, Spanish . Stringent criteria are applied to data from two children to determine what inflections are used productively. Analyses reveal that there is little productive command of verbal morphology at early ages and that subjects begin with a single form per verb. When elements of the verb paradigm do begin to become productive, they do so in a very gradual, piecemeal fashion. Finally, what governs which aspects of the paradigm are learned early seems to be a complex interaction of the input with cognitive and linguistic complexity.