Recursos

This study reports evidence of cross-linguistic influence in possessive constructions in the speech of an EnglishSpanish simultaneous bilingual child between ages 2;3 and 5;6. Although in English possessives might be prenominal (‘-s), they might also be post-nominal (of possessives); the latter realization of the possessive is restricted to certain semantic contexts. In contrast, possession is always post-nominal in Spanish. Unlike the monolingual child English data and the English parental speech which revealed mostly instances of the pre-nominal possessive (only 3% in the child data), the bilingual child produced post-nominal possessives in 33% of his English possessives. Similarly, though the monolingual child Spanish data revealed no non-target-like forms, the bilingual child produced a significant number of pre-nominal possessives (e.g.’de las cabritas mamá’), which is never grammatical in Spanish. The non-target-like forms found in the bilingual child data strongly suggest evidence of influence of Spanish onto English as well as influence of English onto Spanish.

Spanish has a rich verb inflectional system with up to 53 inflectional verb forms distributed between regular and irregular verbs and in which roots are always bound, as verbs must contain markings for person, tense/aspect, and number. The acquisition of verb morphology by native speakers reportedly reflects this complexity in that children produce multiple non-target-like forms wherein tense, person, and number errors are found. This study reports all verb forms identified in the spontaneous speech by a group of 15 native Spanish-speaking children ages 3;6 to 5;6. The analysis of all 233 verb forms analyzed revealed some pronunciation errors, number agreement errors, errors in the use of clitic pronouns, and incorrect use of person and tense agreement. The majority of non-target-like forms identified consisted of regularization of verb forms wherein regular conjugation morphemes were attached to irregular verbs. A few –ar type verbs additionally showed ir-regularization of regular verbs, as children used conjugations which apply to irregular verbs with regular verbs.

This article is a systematization of experiences on the Continuing Education Program of the Western Headquarters of the University of Costa. The objective is to present the challenges and achievements of the first year of work. Five steps were used for the methodology: Departure Point, Initial Questions, Rebuilding the lived Process, Reflection, and Arrival Points. In the reflection step, it is explained why the changes occurred in terms of geographic location, project target population, program objectives, and administrative management issues. The greatest achievement of the program was to offer more courses than those established in the objectives, and its greatest challenge was to deal with the administrative management involved in opening such a program