The Acquisition of Spanish

This is the first book on the acquisition of Spanish that provides a state-of-the-art comprehensive overview of Spanish morphosyntactic development in monolingual and bilingual situations. Its content is organized around key grammatical themes that form the empirical base of research in generative grammar: nominal and verbal inflectional morphology, subject and object pronouns, complex structures involving movement (topicalizations, questions, relative clauses), and aspects of verb meaning that have consequences for syntax. The book argues that Universal Grammar constrains all instances of language acquisition and that there is a fundamental continuity between monolingual, bilingual, child and adult early grammatical systems. While stressing their similarities with respect to linguistic representations and processes, the book also considers important differences between these three acquisition situations with respect to the outcome of acquisition. It is also shown that many linguistic properties of Spanish are acquired earlier than in English and other languages. This book is a must read for those interested in the acquisition of Spanish from different theoretical perspectives as well as those working on the acquisition of other languages in different contexts.

Jason Rothman, University of Iowa, in Modern Language Journal Vol. 90(3), 2006:
This book is an essential resource for all Hispanic linguistic collections. Montrul makes clear assertions and is able to support them. Although she highlights the similarities in L1, 2L1, and adult L2 acquisition in terms of linguistic representations and processes, she also thoughtfully considers the observable differences among them, especially in terms of differences in ultimate attainment. In doing so, this work sits at the cutting edge of contemporary research in generative L2 acquisition, which has attempted to address observable target-deviant aspects of L2 language while assuming adult UG-continuity. This work is a primary source for contemporary Hispanic linguistic research that will be cited for many years to come.