ABSTRACT
In the span of just a few years, children go from a stage in which their vocalizations are limited to cooing or babbling to being able to convey complex ideas in adult-appropriate ways. Much of this expression hinges on morphology. The acquisition of morphology entails the gradual development of the command of the inflectional and derivational devices of Spanish in both production and comprehension. The acquisition of Spanish happens gradually and shows remarkably similar characteristics and timelines across children, albeit with some inter- and intra-individual variation. Children cannot obtain a complete verbal paradigm from the input; they do not observe a given verb with all possible inflections. For this reason, children must generalize patterns from attested forms. Telicity and tense are interwoven in children’s early productions. Children often use perfective past tense with telic predicates, and atelic predicates are often used with present morphology and, later on, imperfective past morphology.
