The acquisition of tense and aspect: Evidence from Portuguese and Spanish

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This paper seeks to understand how the categories tense and aspect are represented in the mental grammars of typically-developing children. Past work has found that English- and French-learning children as old as 6 years of age often use tense marking to convey aspect, conflating the two categories. In contrast, young Spanish speakers appear to treat the two categories as distinct by age 3. We confirm that native learners of Spanish dissociate tense and aspect by 3 years of age and suggest that they may even do so as early as 2;5 or before. We find similar results in Portuguese. We further demonstrate, in line with past work, that the use of aspect marking at this young age might be driven, in part, by differences in lexical telicity.