“…Spanish-speaking children use the present tense before other tenses and when the past tense (preterite) emerges, a frequent oscillation between the present and the past in choice of dominant tense occurs until the age of 5 years. Later, the present stabilizes as the most frequent tense in the spoken narratives of both older children and adults (González, 1980;Maéz, 1981;Bybee, 1985;Kvaal, Shipstead-Cox, Nevitt, Hodson, and Launer, 1988;Sebastián and Slobin, 1994;Montrul, 2004). Consistent with the claim that adult distributional discourse frequencies critically impact on verb form acquisition (Almgren and Idiazabal, 2001;Theakston, Lieven, and Tomasello, 2003; see also Harley, 2008), the ubiquitous presence of the present tense in the routine adult conversation in which Spanish-speaking children develop appears to provide the daily input to reinforce the prominent use and early acquisition of this tense in Spanish.…”