When acquiring the English plural, children correctly produce plural words long before they develop an understanding of morphological structure. When acquiring Sesotho noun prefixes, children are aware of the multiple constraints governing variation from a young age. Both of these cases raise questions about the Shin and Miller (2022) account of…

The article by Amaral and Roeper (this issue; henceforth A&R) presents many interesting ideas about first and second language acquisition as well as some experimental data convincingly illustrating the difference between production and comprehension. The article extends the concept of Universal Bilingualism proposed in Roeper (1999) to second…

This study tested the effect of the phoneme's linguistic affiliation (Standard Arabic versus Spoken Arabic) on phoneme recognition among five-year-old Arabic native speaking kindergarteners (N=60). Using a picture selection task of words beginning with the same phoneme, and through careful manipulation of the phonological properties of target…

Argues that evolution of the phonological systems of natural languages and the typology of distinctive features is based on perceptual discontinuities of the auditory system. It is suggested that neonates rely on these innate sensitivities for acquisition of sound systems and that some phonological variation in early child phonology results from…

Research on child language acquisition should distinguish between different possible causes of variation and not just attribute variation to individual variation. An alternative analysis using a different methodology can show that children's patterns of acquisition are actually relatively similar. (Author/CB)

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.…

Part of a study is presented of native speakers of Hebrew who are acquiring English without formal instruction. A Hebrew-speaking child, aged 5 years 6 months, and her American playmate were audiotaped bi-weekly in natural settings for 11 months. The American child periodically used "foreigner talk," that is, the variety of language…

Attention to the language practices of school-age children and teenagers is essential for a complete understanding of how language use can vary in the social construction of everyday activity across the life span. This book examines a wide variety of language practices using data from naturally occurring recorded talk and careful observation of…

The collection of essays on language contact and language conflict includes: "Language Choices: Contact and Conflict?" (Martin Putz); "Language Ecology: Contact Without Conflict" (Peter Muhlhausler); "Towards a Dynamic View of Multilingualism" (Ulrike Jessner); "A Matter of Choice" (Florian Coulmas); The…

Papers presented at the symposium on the relationship between language and culture include, in addition to an opening adress: "Sociosemiotics Across Cultures" (Wolfgang Kuhlwein); "Translation Across Languages or Across Cultures?" (Albrecht Neubert); "Grammatical Categories Across Cultures" (Olga Tomic); "On…