Development of child language is tremendously complex, remarkable and wondrous. In a second language acquisition context, a child can acquire his second language in either acquiring both languages at the same time or learning the second language after mastering the first one. This present research is concerned to describe the syntactical…

A study of the syntactic development of discourse in and after adolescence among fluent English speakers in a bilingual community of East Los Angeles focused on subordinate devices not observed until adolescence, such as the relative clause using "which" and clauses using "even though/although." Discourse analysis of these…

Several recent reports on the untutored second language acquisition of English have suggested that the same developmental sequence holds for the acquisition of the interrogative structures irrespective of whether English is acquired as a first language (L1) or a second language (L2). These studies have been conducted within the Klima & Bellugi…

This investigation was designed to examine the acquisition of a set of complex English structures by Egyptian Arabic-speaking adult learners at different levels of proficiency. Two studies were conducted using the methodology of Chomsky as adapted by d'Anglejan and Tucker. In addition, some subjects were asked to translate a number of stimulus…

Developmental data from the acquisition of English by a German child, aged 5, are analyzed with a view to identifying structural conditions that give rise to interference, and to determine which L2 structures are affected and which structures govern developmental changes. Word order in German and English sentences ahve reflexes in different…

This paper investigates the second language acquisition of interrogative-word questions in English. It is shown that the data from some bilingual English speakers at Pan American University are comparable to the data noted by others for both second and first language acquisition of interrogative word questions. In particular, interrogative-word…

The theoretical linguistic distinction between assertion and presupposition was empirically tested with two groups of subjects, young children acquiring English as their first language and adults acquiring English as a second language. (Author)

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…

The research reported in this paper is concerned with three questions. Are the processes of language development complete by the time children begin school? What is the order of the emergence of control of grammatical rules? And is that order similar for first and second language learners? The data used in the analysis come from a project centered…

Two separate tests which measure children's ability to produce standard grammatical and phonological features when they speak, provide pre-instructional and post-instructional data to help determine instructional emphases. The structured response test, requiring 15 minutes to administer, yields a profile of group performance in the production of…