This article studies the acquisition of copulas by a Spanish-English bilingual between the ages of 1;6 and 3;0, examines the possibility of interlanguage influence, and considers the distributional frequencies of copular constructions in the speech of the child and in the language input from adults. The study is of interest because the bilingual…

Two studies investigated developmental changes, and inter-linguistic and inter-individual variations, in the expansion and composition of young French children's early lexicons. Results indicated that lexical productivity strongly increased with age, whereas lexical diversity showed little developmental progression. Inter-individual variability in…

Explored effects of interactional feedback on children's second language (L2) development in a prettest/posttest design. Child learners carried out communicative tasks that provided contexts for targeted forms and interactional feedback to occur. An experimental group received interactional feedback in response to non-targetlike production of…

A study of the acquisition of Turkish and German by immigrant children in West Germany addressed three issues: (1) the role of cognitive development and age of learning in the process of language acquisition, (2) the role of transfer between languages, and (3) the effects of greater or lesser contact with native speakers of the two languages being…

Discusses variation in interlanguage and suggests two hypotheses to explain such variation as multiple internal representations of a form and processing errors. Suggests that second language learners can initially represent new forms as prototype schemas, and that such non-discrete representations are a third source of variation in interlanguage.…

Describes one aspect of a Welsh/English bilingual child being raised in England. The father is a native speaker of Welsh, and the mother has learned Welsh in order to speak it to her son. The father accommodates both the mother's and the child's linguistic errors. Areas of accommodation are identified and possible reasons discussed. (Author/LMO)

Analyzes the language acquisition of a bilingual (Estonian/English) child. Discusses his preference for acquiring whole words as opposed to inflections and offers several possible reasons for this particular learning strategy. (EKN)

Analyzed sound systems of six phonologically disordered children and assessed relative phonological knowledge of target sounds. After-treatment results indicated that error sounds of which the children had the most knowledge were easiest to learn. Treatment beginning with the most difficult sounds resulted in more widespread changes in the…

Three aspects of bilingual code-switching are examined: (1) code-switching as an integral part of bilingual behavior, especially in early stages of language acquisition; (2) social factors influencing the child's ability to differentiate languages and make an appropriate language choice; and (3) hierarchical organization of these social factors,…

Dutch native children and Turkish immigrant children, born and reared in the Netherlands, were asked to tell a story from a series of pictures, at age six and again at age eight. The Turkish children exhibited about the same level of narrative proficiency in Dutch as their Dutch peers. (Author/LMO)

Data on Dutch-Turkish language-mixing behavior of Turkish children growing up in The Netherlands are presented and analyzed. While functional characteristics of the children's language-mixing were compatible with models from earlier research, structural analysis suggests no universality of surface structure constraint rules for sentence-internal…

A case study investigated the emergence of language and language concepts in a bilingual child, a girl aged 16 months to 6 years, 7 months. Observations were made by the child's parents and relatives in the child's home where the mother spoke Finnish and the father English. The report summarizes developments in phonology, morphology, word-level…

Six papers on interlanguage are presented. The first, "Language Transfer," experimentally tests Robert Lado's contrastive analysis principles on the transfer of language skills to second language acquisition. The second paper, called "Interlanguage," builds on this work in discussing the structured nature of interlanguage and…

Presents various viewpoints on dual language acquisition by children. These include native language foundation, first-language monolinguals' vocabulary development, second-language learning, simultaneous acquisition strategies, television as a source of language learning, functions of language in discourse, analysis of conversation, syntax and…

A study examined the acquisition of negation in English as a Second Language in a 4-year-old Salvadoran girl, a native speaker of Spanish. Specifically, the study looked for evidence of language transfer in bilingual acquisition and the direction of that transfer (Spanish to English, English to Spanish). Over 5 months, spontaneous speech (55…