The acquisition of mood selection in Spanish relative clauses

Although children acquire Spanish subjunctive morphology early in the process of language acquisition, they only master mood selection in a staged process that lasts for several years. This paper examines the possibility that the acquisition of subjunctive mood selection in particular syntactic contexts is constrained by cognitive development in the area of representational theory of mind. Acquisition of the epistemic aspects of the semantics of subjunctive are shown to be associated with the understanding of false beliefs, a landmark development in children's cognition. Twenty-two Spanish speaking children between the ages of 3;5 and 6;11 participated in an elicited production study designed to test whether children's ability to produce subjunctive relative clauses was related to their ability to pass a false belief task. Results indicate a strong correlation between children's ability to use the subjunctive mood in relative clauses and their capacity for understanding false beliefs.