BUCLD 39 Proceedings To be published in 2015 by Cascadilla Press Rights forms signed by all authors Person and Number Asymmetries in the Acquisition of Spanish Agreement and Object Clitics Hannah Forsythe * Spanish verb inflection carries number and person information and object clitics carry person, number, and gender information. Children acquiring Spanish must therefore learn to use this information to retrieve the antecedent. Spanish present-tense agreement Spanish object clitics singular plural singular plural 1 st person -o -mos me nos 2 nd person -s -- 1 te -- 3 rd person Ø -n lo (masc) la (fem) los (masc) las (fem) Children acquiring languages with rich verbal morphology generally produce highly accurate verbal inflection from very early on (Phillips 1995), and Spanish is no exception (Bel & Rosado 2009). However, evidence that children can interpret these person and number cues is mixed. The age at which children successfully use agreement in comprehension tasks varies by language, by task and also by form. For example, Dominican and Mexican Spanish-speaking children show greater sensitivity to 3 rd person plural marker /-n/ than to the zero- marked 3 rd person singular (Pérez-Leroux 2005, Legendre et al 2014), and Mexican and Chilean children show greater sensitivity to the 2 nd person singular marker /-s/ than to either of the 3 rd person forms (Miller & Schmitt 2014, experiment 3). These asymmetries are summarized below, where > indicates greater sensitivity: (1) 2S /-s/ > 3P /-n/ > 3S ø * Michigan State University, forsyt40@msu.edu. Many thanks to the teachers, children, and administrators at SEDI, Mexico City, in particular Patricia de la Fuente and Beti López Juárez. Thanks to Antoinette Hawayek and Camila Alfonso for help with adults participants. Thanks to Cristina Schmitt, Alan Munn, Jessica Gamache, Ni La Le, and the rest of the MSU language acquisition lab for insightful feedback. 1 Latin American varieties of Spanish, including Mexican Spanish, examined here, does not employ a separate inflection or object clitic for 2 nd person plural. Instead, the 3 rd person plural form is used. Additionally, the formal 2 nd person singular agreement and clitics are syncretic with 3 rd person singular forms. These forms are not tested here. Text