This article discusses the dynamic nature of childhood bilingualism by analyzing oral speech from returnee heritage speakers (HSs) of Portuguese, who grew up in Germany, but moved to Portugal in childhood/adolescence. The first dataset from 14 speakers showed that the length of exposure to German predicted the rate of (in)accurate production of…

Speech samples were elicited by means of the Bilingual Syntax Measure from eleven children ages 27-48 months, covering a wide span of linguistic development. Presence or absence of eleven functors was scored in obligatory occasions and an acquisition sequence determined using three methods of speech analysis. (CHK)

This study investigated second-language (L2) learning to gain a better understanding of learning mechanisms that also operate in child first-language L1 learners. The research was inspired by research on the beneficial effects of child-directed speech CDS. We tried to examine whether such benefits can be observed in the domain of inflectional…

Discusses the shortcomings of the morpheme order approach in first and second language acquisition research, and proposes instead the notion of developmental sequence, drawing on examples from data on four German children learning English naturalistically. (Author/AM)

Investigated the effects of various types of negotiation on learners' output. The study focused on three groups of child learners of Dutch who were asked to orally describe a series of pictures to a partner in a communicative context. Results indicated how and to what extent participants interactionally modified their output. (Author/CK) (59…