The Development of Grammatical Case Distinctions in the Use of Personal Pronouns by Spanish-Speaking Preschoolers

Abstract

Data on personal pronoun development in Spanish-speaking children was obtained in this study. Forty monolingual Puerto Rican Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 2;0 and 3;11 participated in the investigation. Two tasks were designed to obligate production of nominative and object pronouns in both reflexive and non-reflexive forms. Productive use and error analysis data were obtained and compared to previous data on pronoun development in English. By contrast with the order of productive use of grammatical case distinctions reported in the literature for English-speaking children, the children in the present study demonstrated a pattern in which nominative pronoun use preceded object case use. Implications of these findings for developmental theories that have been presented to explain pronoun development are discussed.