Subject Pronoun Expression (SPE) in Dominican Spanish

It has been long discussed whether the omission of the 2sg /-s/ verbal affix have led to a higher pronoun expression as a compensatory strategy to disambiguate between ambiguous tenses. Preliminary data indicates that Dominican Spanish-speaking children use more pronouns than their parents (Román and Miller, in preparation) possibly related to processing load. Previous work in children and adults' speech planning suggests that they use the same attentional-cognitive mechanisms to plan and produce sentences (e.g., Bunger et al., 2012). However, when looking at their language production, children and parents behave differently. My work uses eye-tracking tasks, behavioral and corpus methods to explore this phenomenon in children and their caregivers. More specifically how children attend to constraining cues and the interactions of these cues in relation to their cognitive development and acquisition of variation.