The emergence of nominal expressions in Spanish-English early bilinguals: Economy and bilingual first language acquisition

The previous section has outlined a broad state of the art of research on the acquisition of nominal expressions in Spanish, underscoring the need for a study that details the acquisition of the nominal syntactic category in monolingual and bilingual child Spanish. The present study aims to fill this gap by presenting a longitudinal multiple-case study that focuses on the inner structure of nominal expressions in Spanish when it is acquired as a single first language or in addition to a typologically distinct language. Thus, our study joins other published longitudinal studies (i.e., Deuchar & Quay, 2000; Fantini, 1985; Silva-Corvalán, 2014), although their focus and theoretical approach are different from those in the present study. More specifically, none of the previous studies narrow their analyses to the acquisition of a particular syntactic category and its properties, none of the previous studies aim to test predictions based on claims made in formal grammar, and none of them examine longitudinal data for more than two children.