Revealing Early Comprehension of Subject-Verb Agreement in Spanish

Previous research has revealed that, in at least some languages, children’s comprehension of subject-verb (SV) agreement is delayed compared to production. For example, children acquiring Spanish and English have not been found to show comprehension of number agreement in the 3 person until surprisingly late, around age 5 (Spanish: PérezLeroux, 2005; English: Johnson, de Villiers, & Seymour, 2005). However, children acquiring these languages are claimed to reliably produce SV agreement by age 21⁄2 (Mueller Gathercole eb sti n o to, 1999; Montrul, 2004). Thus, the acquisition of SV agreement early in development appears to represent a striking reversal of the typical comprehensionproduction asymmetry (Fraser, Bellugi, & Brown, 1963). In a recent series of studies, we have shown that comprehension of number SV agreement is not in fact universally late, but may depend on language-particular factors. Using identical methodology and visual stimuli, we found evidence of successful comprehension of agreement by Frenchlearning children as young as 30 months, but failed to find such evidence in Spanish-learning children as old as 47 months (Legendre, Barrière, Goyet, & Nazzi, 2010; Barrière, Nazzi, Legendre, Goyet, & Kresh, 2010; Legendre, Culbertson, Zaroukian, Hsin, Barrière, & Nazzi, in press). The present study builds on this line of research on cross-linguistic differences in acquisition of agreement by investigating the role of a new task feature: the use of pseudo-words used in the verbal stimuli. Accordingly, we reassess the question of whether early comprehension of SV can be found in Spanish, testing Mexican Spanish-learning children aged 40 to 60 months.