Distributional learning is a proposal for how infants might learn early speech sound categories from acoustic input before they know many words. When categories in the input differ greatly in relative frequency and overlap in acoustic space, research in bilingual development suggests that this affects the course of development. In the present…

In an investigation of discourse sensitivity, Catalan-speaking children aged 4 to 8 years were asked two different questions in a picture description task. One was a wide-focus question ("What is happening?"); the other was a narrow-focus question ("What is happening to 'the patient'?"). Children of all age groups displayed sensitivity to the…

Analysis of the responses of Spanish, Chinese, and German learners of English-as-a-Second-Language to English sentences with empty pronominal categories found that, although empty pronouns were pragmatically more natural in finite clauses of Spanish and Chinese than in English or German, only the Spanish subjects had significantly higher mean…

Investigations of Japanese speakers' interlanguage constructions of English existential sentences with a locative sentential topic found a general shift from topic-comment to subject-predicate structures as proficiency increased. (24 references) (Author/CB)

The parameter-setting model of universal grammar provides a basis for integrating two theories of second language acquisition: contrastive analysis and creative construction. The elicited responses of adult native speakers of Spanish and adult native speakers of Japanese were examined. The head-initial/head-final parameter was the principle…

Extends the line of research that has recently applied the savings paradigm from cognitive psychology to vocabulary relearning. Second language data from 3044 returnees from Japan and Korea provide evidence of the strongest savings effect yet reported in studies of lexical reactivation. (Author/VWL)

Analysis of data derived from an earlier study of Japanese-English interlanguage shows that discourse-pragmatic markedness conditions on the subject position combine with central aspects of a configurational syntax in the generation of sentential forms, creating a module interface distinct from the native or second language. (38 references)…

Error analysis of the informal conversations (in both the interlanguage [IL] and native language) of two native Vietnamese speakers gave limited support to the hypothesis that a universal preference for the open syllable is a shaping force in IL phonology that is independent of the process of native language transfer. (Author/CB)

Examination of the lexical compensatory strategies Dutch students of English used in a picture-naming task, a story retell task, and an oral interview showed that proficiency level was inversely related to the number of compensatory strategies the subjects used. The type of strategy was not related to proficiency level. (33 references) (Author/CB)

Investigates whether Spanish- and Turkish-speaking learners of English discover the semantic and syntactic constraints on the causative/inchoative alternation in the absence of overt morphological clues. Results of a picture judgment task show that second language learners do discover these properties and that overall verbs appear to cluster in…

Argues that abstract, figurative senses of polysemous words are better retained when learners are given core senses as cues, because providing a core sense helps learners develop a "precise elaboration." Results of a series of vocabulary studies involving Dutch learners of English show that providing a core sense results in better guessing and…

A study compared the Swedish tone accent acquisition of native-speaking children (N=2) and nonnative speaking college students (N=12). Both groups overgeneralized one pitch pattern to all bisyllabic words. Children used "Accent 2" (two-peaked) and adults "Accent 1" (one-peaked), analogous to the prevailing patterns of their…

Investigates the acquisition of temporality in English by Korean speakers over a period of 24 months. Temporality is examined from two perspectives: the expression of past-time events and semantic aspect and verb morphology. Results are discusses. (Author/VWL)

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…

Orthogonally manipulated three word characteristics in Dutch and English--word imageability; word frequency; and cognate status--and obtained similar data patterns for three groups of bilinguals different from one another in second-language fluency. Findings indicate that "concept mediation" is a universal process in translating words…