Languages long in contact in the Andean countries, Quechua and Spanish are intriguing partners in bilingual speech because they exhibit very different word order patterns. In a study exploring the development of Spanish word order in Quechua-speaking children, Minaya & Luján (1982) reported that children frequently produced "hybrid" (S)VOV structures. They proposed that the children had a transitional grammar with a nonadult phrase structure rule.

This study presents a vigorous challenge to this claim. First, both adult and child speakers of Quechua duplicate not only verbs, but a variety of constituent types, presumably for emphatic effect. Second, the Minaya & Luján proposal attributed to the children a transitional "wild grammar." It will be shown that the appearance of the VOV pattern in child L2 Spanish clearly represents transfer of a pragmatic strategy and not a transitional, illicit, hybrid grammar.