This year's conference theme, "Be Seen, Be Heard," reflected not only our goal of celebrating our achievements but also represented our intent of making sure everyone's voices are heard, especially during 2017's difficult political climate. The conference opened with a motivating address from Dean Laura E. Lyons, followed by an…

The data for this study consisted of a longitudinal corpus of narratives from 17 English second language (L2) children, mean age of 5;4 years at the outset, with first languages (Lls) that do not have definite/indefinite articles (Chinese, Korean and Japanese) and Lls that do have article systems (Spanish, Romanian and Arabic). We examined these…

The vocabulary development in the first 11 weeks of English acquisition by a 5-year-old Japanese girl was studied. The girl and her mother (a linguistic researcher) arrived in the United States at the start of the study. Lexical data from a language diary kept by the mother and from adult and peer sessions were pooled to produce a chronological…

A study of second language acquisition focuses on the transition from formulaic to creative speech patterns. Subjects were two native Japanese-speaking children, aged 4 and 8, learning English as a Second Language in New York, observed over a period of 2 years. The nature of formulaic speech is discussed, drawing from research on such speech and…

Presents a psycholinguistic analysis of young children's performance in Japanese before, during, and after a two-month stay in Japan from the perspective of Vygotsky and the Soviet school of psycholinguistics. Looks at the social function of their utterances, the types of regulation involved, and strategic functions that may be intended. (SED)

Examines the second stage of natural second language attrition in the first language environment observed in a Japanese male returnee child. The subject spent 7 years in the United States, was 8-years-old when he returned, and was highly proficient in English. The second stage is characterized by a period of change in syntax and morphology,…

Study of children who go through a "silent period" early in the course of second language development found that most of the children engaged in extensive private speech, including: repetition of others' utterances; recall and practice; creation of new linguistic forms; paradigmatic substitution; and rehearsal for overt social…

Analysis of data from the first six months of acquisition of English as a second language by a Japanese five-year-old illustrated the role of modular "chunking" and coupling in the second language acquisition process, apparent in the child's pre-copula and copula referential utterances. (Author/CB)

This paper reports on a study in which twenty young adults were tested for their ability to accurately reproduce the articulatory and prosodic features of three non-Indo-European languages in which they had received instruction. The first of two basic goals of this research was to test, at the purely phonetic level, the "critical period for…

Reports on an eight month study examining the development of turn-allocation devices in children acquiring English as a second language. The role of prior language experience in second language learning is explored. (Author/AM)

A study investigated the hypothesis that during the "silent" period of second language learning, in which there is a dramatic drop in language directed to speakers of the second language, children not only passively assimilate second language input but also use private speech to actively integrate it. The study examined the learning…

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…

A naturalistic study looked at the acquisition of English by two Japanese boys, aged 4 and 8 years, during a 2.5-year stay in the United States. Data were collected through observation and transcription of spontaneous speech in daily life. Analysis included a variety of features of language use and of the acquisition process, including attitudes…

Selected papers include: "From Core to Periphery: A Study on the Directionality of Syntactic Change in Japanese" (Kaoru Horie); "On the Extension of Body-Part Nouns to Object-Part Nouns and Spatial Adpositions" (Yo Matsumoto); "Noun Classes: Language Change and Learning" (Maria Polinsky, Dan Jackson);…