A preliminary comparison of verb tense production in Spanish speakers with expressive restrictions

Spoken verb tense use in three groups of Spanish speakers with expressive limitations, namely, children with specific language impairment, bilingual children with first language (L1) (Spanish) attrition and adults with agrammatism, was compared in order to examine the possible impact of conversational tense frequency on expressive production. Based on the notion that frequent language forms in typical discourse are preferred in contexts of expressive restrictions, we predicted that tenses with high spoken occurrence will be favoured by individuals in our expressively limited groups. The incidence of tense use by the participants was assessed in oral narratives and/or a sentence repetition task. Consistent with our prediction, the most frequent verb tenses in conversational Spanish--the present, followed by the preterite--were preferred by the participants thus supporting the proposal that a socio-cognitive factor linking discursive frequency to verb retrieval may be operating in tense preference in situations of expressive stress.