Resumen de The production of ser and estar in Catalan/Spanish bilingual children

Alejandro Cuza, Pedro Guijarro Fuentes

• We investigate the production of ser and estar in Spanish and Catalan among simultaneous bilingual children. Specifically, we examine copula use with locatives, adjectives and events. Monolingual Spanish children and bilingual adults served as control baselines. Results showed overextension of estar with Catalan locatives and adjectives stemming from variability in the input and cross-linguistic influence from Spanish. In regard to Spanish, the data showed expected copula use with adjectives and locatives. Furthermore, the bilingual children showed high use of estar with event locatives in both languages. We argue for lack of specification of the semantic features of ser with events due to frequency of the structure and reduced input.