Spanish acquisition by monolingual children: A bibliography

This bibliographic compilation (including both the BibEs-Archive and the BibEs-References) was the result of a collaborative search aimed at collecting studies on the acquisition of oral Spanish by monolingual children up to the year 2000.

All levels of linguistic analyses were included, with the only exception of phonology. Studies on language disorders were not part of the search.

Two papers –written by our research team—offer survey articles based on the publications in the archive:

Ordóñez, C., Barriga, R., Snow, C., Uccelli, P., Shiro, M. & Schnell, B. (2001). Sintaxis y discurso. Dos áreas de investigación en la adquisición del español oral. In Revista Latina de Pensamiento y Lenguaje.

Shiro, M., Uccelli, P., Ordóñez, C., Barriga, R., Snow, C. & Schnell, B. (2000). Learning to talk: A partial review of research on Spanish language development. IASCL 1999 Conference Proceedings.

Given the aims of the bibliographic search, studies on abnormal development, literacy and writing, bilingualism, and phonology were not actively searched for. However, in the process of collecting the targeted articles, some studies on these other fields of study got to our hands. Consequently, a few references indeed cover some of these other fields, but are scarce and somewhat arbitrary additions to this collection.

Even though the deadline for the bibliography is the year 2000, a few references display later dates because we had received them as work in progress prior to 2000 and decided to include the most updated entry in the final list.

Research Team

• Catherine E. Snow, Harvard Graduate School of Education.
• Rebeca Barriga-Villanueva, El Colegio de Mexico.
• Martha Shiro, Universidad Central de Venezuela.
• Claudia L. Ordóñez, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia.
• Beatrice Schnell, Ed. D., Harvard Graduate School of Education.
• Paola Uccelli, Ed. D., Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University for their financial support. We also want to express our gratitude to Shawna Hegarty and Carla Lillvik for invaluable help with bibliographic searches and to Dr. Lowry Hemphill for generously providing us with access to office space and computers. Finally, we want to thank all the numerous researchers around the world who generously contributed own and others’ references making this project feasible. We hope that this step constitutes only the beginning of an ongoing enterprise as researchers studying Spanish acquisition could later on add their future studies to this list.