A B S T R A C TNativist and constructivist accounts differ in their characterization of children's knowledge of grammatical categories. In this paper we present research on the process of acquisition of a particular grammatical system, gender agreement in the Spanish noun phrase, in children under three years of age. The design of the longitudinal study employed presents some variations in relation to classical studies. The aim was to obtain a large corpus of NP data which would allow different types of analysis of the children's productions to be carried out. Intra-individual variability in early NP types was analyzed and measured, and an elicitation task for adjectives was used. Results show that the acquisition of NP and gender agreement is a complex process which advances as the children gradually integrate different pieces of evidence : phonological, distributional and functional. The reduction of variability as the grammatical process advances is a key feature for its explanation.

El desarrollo gramatical constituye uno de los procesos cruciales del desarrollo cognitivo en los primeros años de vida. Este artículo presenta datos obtenidos mediante el MCDI-E, una versión revisada y ampliada de los Inventarios MacArthur-Bates de Desarrollo Comunicativo (MCDI), que permite evaluar el uso de la gramática en niños hablantes de español de 16 a los 30 meses. Se describen los cambios introducidos con respecto a la escala original, los cuales refuerzan la relación del instrumento con las concepciones actuales en la psicolingüística evolutiva. Se presentan los primeros resultados (n=238) del estudio de baremación en curso, relativos a la correlación de la gramática con los demás apartados del inventario (vocalizaciones y vocabulario), a la evolución gramatical (coherentes con datos previos longitudinales y experimentales), y a la fiabilidad del cuestionario. A partir de ellos es posible afirmar que el MCDI-E incluye un procedimiento eficaz y fiable para evaluar el desarrollo gramatical temprano.

Sentence repetition tasks (SRTs) have been widely used in language development research for decades. In recent years, there has been increasing interest in studying performance in SRTs as a clinical marker for language impairment. What are the characteristics of SRTs? For what purposes have SRTs been used? To what extent have they been used with young children, in different languages, and with different clinical populations? In order to answer these and other questions, we conducted a scoping review. Peer reviewed studies published in indexed scientific journals (2010–2021) were analyzed. A search in different databases yielded 258 studies. Research published in languages other than English or Spanish, adult samples, dissertations, case studies, artificial models, and theoretical publications were excluded. After this exclusion, 203 studies were analyzed. Our results show that most research using SRT were conducted with English monolingual speakers older than 5 years of age; studies with bilingual participants have mostly been published since 2016; and SRTs have been used with several non-typical populations. Research suggests that they are a reliable tool for identifying language difficulties and are specifically suitable for detecting developmental language disorder.

Sentence repetition tasks have been widely used in the last years as a diagnostic tool in developmental language disorders. However in Spanish there are few (if any) of these instruments, especially for younger children. In this context, we develop a new Sentence Repetition Task for assessing language (morphosyntactic) abilities of very young Spanish children. A list of 33 sentences of different length and complexity was created and included in the task. A total of 130 typical developing children from 2 to 4 years of age were engaged in a play situation and asked to repeat the sentences. Children’s answers were scored for accuracy at sentence and word level and error analysis at the word level was undertaken. Besides a subsample of 92 children completed a non-word repetition task. First results show its adequacy to children from 2 to 4 years of age, its capacity to discriminate between different developmental levels, and its concurrent validity with the nonword repetition task.

This study analyzes the relationship between lexical and grammatical development in Spanish children. The (European) Spanish version of the MacArthur-Bates CDI was used and administered to 593 Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 16 and 30-months-old. Regression analysis was applied to evaluate the relationship between age, vocabulary (total vocabulary, nouns, and verbs) and grammatical scores on two subsections of the Grammar Part. Total vocabulary explained a significantly greater proportion of variance in grammatical outcomes than age did. However, noun and verb vocabularies did not explain a greater proportion of variance in their respective morphologies than total vocabulary did. Additionally, the predictive relationship between vocabulary and grammar was found to be weaker for children whose scores were below the 10th percentile, although this could be due to the minor variability in this group and to extreme cases. We discuss the implications of these results in relation to the question of continuity between early vocabulary and grammar development in children.