The acquisition of mood selection in Spanish relative clauses

Although children acquire Spanish subjunctive morphology early in the proce ss of language acquisition, they only master mood selection in a staged pro cess that lasts for several years. This paper examines the possibility that the acquisition of subjunctive mood selection in particular syntactic cont exts is constrained by cognitive development in the area of representationa l theory of mind. Acquisition of the epistemic aspects of the semantics of subjunctive are shown to be associated with the understanding of false beli efs, a landmark development in children's cognition. Twenty-two Spanish spe aking children between the ages of 3;5 and 6;II participated in an elicited production study designed to test whether children's ability to produce su bjunctive relative clauses was related to their ability to pass a false bel ief task. Results indicate a strong correlation between children's ability to use the subjunctive mood in relative clauses and their capacity for unde rstanding false beliefs.