Morphological complexity (MC) is a relatively new construct in second language acquisition (SLA). After critically discussing existing approaches to calculating MC in first- and second-language acquisition research, this article presents a new operationalization of the construct, the Morphological Complexity Index (MCI). The MCI is applied in two…

Acquisitionists generally assume a relation between code-mixing in young bilingual and trilingual children and language dominance. In our cross-sectional study we investigated the possible relation between code-mixing and language dominance in 122 children raised in Spain or Germany. They were bilingual, trilingual or multilingual, the latter…

A primary function of prosody in many languages is to convey information structure--the "packaging" of a sentence's content into categories such as "focus", "given" and "topic". In English and other West Germanic languages it is widely assumed that focus is signaled prosodically by the location of a…

The relationship between the realization of the argument-structure of a verb and its acquisition as a lexical item was investigated in a case study. The subject was a girl aged 2.3 years whose father was a native English-speaker and whose mother was a native Japanese speaker who also spoke English. The child had been born in the United States but…

A bilingual child's development of word order in German and English subordinate clauses was followed between age 3 and 5, and a number of diversions from the development of word order in such clauses by monolingual children was noted. (Contains five references.) (Author/LB)

Presents a case study of a six-year-old Finnish girl who learned a foreign language by watching English language cartoons on video, without formal teaching or contact with native speakers. Topics addressed include television versus video; sentence structure; rate of speech; repetition; and learning by viewing versus naturalistic language learning.…

A study compared the perceptions of two experts from different cultural backgrounds concerning salience of a variety of errors typical of the English written by Hong Kong secondary and college students. A book on English error types written by a Hong-Kong born, fluent Chinese-English bilingual linguist was analyzed for its emphases, and a list of…