The acquisition of cleavage in Peninsular Spanish

Abstract

Considering the variation of cleavage in current Spanish, this paper aims at investigating how Spanish children acquire these constructions. The main question in  this text is whether Spanish children initially produce constructions which do not exist in the adult European variety and then they lose them or if those children never produce these constructions. 18 children between 2 and 10 years (2 children for each age group) from the CHILDES corpus were analyzed. The data showed that children produce constructions which do not exist in the adult grammar, being one of those constructions only present on a 3 year old child and the another remains at all ages. The interpretation of the data is that there is not, at first, a problem of language acquisition, but variation in Spanish because the constructions are considered to be nonexistent in many studies in the speech of adults interacting with children.