Evidence from experimental studies of Spanish children's production of determiners reveals that they pay more attention to phonological cues present in nouns than to natural semantics when assigning gender to determiners (Pérez-Pereira, 1991). This experimental work also demonstrated that Spanish children are more likely to produce the correct determiner when given a noun with phonological cues which suggest it is masculine, and more likely to assign masculine gender to nouns with ambiguous cues. In this paper, we investigate the phonological cues available to children and seek to explore the possibility that differential frequency in the linguistic input explains the priority given to masculine forms when children are faced with ambiguous novel items. A connectionist model of determiner production was incrementally trained on a lexicon of determiner–noun phrases taken from parental speech in a longitudinal study of a child between the ages of 1;7 and 2;11 (López Ornat, Fernandez, Gallo & Mariscal, 1994) preserving the type and token frequency information. An analysis of the database of parental productions revealed that while regular feminine nouns were slightly more frequent than regular masculine nouns, irregular masculine nouns outnumbered irregular feminine nouns by roughly 2 to 1. On the basis of this, we made the prediction that as the training lexicon builds up, the network will perform better overall on masculine determiners than would be predicted from their forms alone and will tend to assign masculine gender to ambiguous novel nouns in a test set. The findings indicate that, at least in the case of Spanish gender agreement for determiners and nouns, a general associative learning mechanism can account for important characteristics of the acquisition process seen in children.

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In 1957, Skinner, in his "Verbal Behavior", proposed an explanation on how a language is learned. In 1959, Chomsky strongly argued the non-learnability of language, establishing in the field of developmental psycholinguistics the substitution of the term "learning" for that of "acquisition". Currently, the constructivist models describe language acquisition as a process of ontogenetic, gradual, complex, and adaptive change. This new theoretical framework has been especially useful for rereading Verbal Behavior because it facilitates recovering the Skinnerian learning mechanisms. This can be observed in the recent research trends that recapture reinforcement and imitation (echoic responses), although they are now located in the initial phases of the process and are included in a cognitive dynamic that, by gradually increasing its complexity, can achieve grammar. The new constructivist theoretical framework, by retrieving the functional and referential aspects of language, can also take advantage of the classic Skinnerian proposal about the pragmatic types of verbal behavior, providing it with new meaning. Keywords: Language Learnability, Imitation, Reinforcement, Skinner En 1957 Skinner, en su obra Conducta Verbal, propuso una explicación sobre cómo se aprende un lenguaje. En 1959 Chomsky argumentó contundentemente la no aprendibilidad del lenguaje instaurando en el ámbito de la psicolingüística evolutiva la sustitución del término aprendizaje por el de adquisición. En la actualidad los modelos constructivistas describen la adquisición del lenguaje como un proceso de cambio ontogenético, gradual, complejo y adaptativo. Este nuevo marco teórico ha resultado especialmente idóneo para la re-lectura de la Conducta Verbal porque permite cierta recuperación de los mecanismos de aprendizaje skinnerianos. Esto se manifiesta en las recientes líneas de investigación que recuperan el refuerzo y la imitación (respuestas ecoicas) aunque localizándolos en las fases iniciales del proceso e incluyéndolos en una dinámica cognitiva que, al aumentar gradualmente su complejidad, puede llegar a obtener una gramática. Además, el nuevo marco teórico constructivista, al recuperar las vertientes funcionales y referenciales del lenguaje, puede aprovechar la clásica propuesta skinneriana sobre los tipos pragmáticos de conducta verbal, dotándola de un nuevo sentido.

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