Hizkuntzaren jabekuntzaz Fontes-en

Abstract

This article revises those articles published in the journal Fontes concerning language acquisition and, after a brief summary of each study, some reflection is made as to what we find. Following a painstaking process of research, only two articles exclusively given over to the subject are revealed, and one of these touches on language acquisition in a rather tangential manner. The two monographic articles deal with key themes in language development. The first describes the characteristics of the language in the pregrammatical phase and the teething years of Basque’s grammatical phase; the second article, which deals with bilingualism, questions a widely-accepted hypothesis on the mix of linguistic systems in a primary stage of acquisition of the two languages. The second article, following a study of the acquisition of noun phrases in Basque and Castilian –languages with totally divergent structural characteristics– in children from bilingual families, shows that the presumed system mix does not occur and that children differentiate the morphosyntactic rules of the two languages from the outset of the grammatical phase.