It has been proposed that children differ from adults in that children license a conjunctive inference to disjunctive sentences that lack any licensing expression. The proposal is that children infer "A and B" from sentences of the form "A or B." Although children's conjunctive interpretations of disjunction have been reported…

This article studies the acquisition of copulas by a Spanish-English bilingual between the ages of 1;6 and 3;0, examines the possibility of interlanguage influence, and considers the distributional frequencies of copular constructions in the speech of the child and in the language input from adults. The study is of interest because the bilingual…

Investigated whether crosslinguistic interference occurs in the domain of subject realization in Spanish in a bilingual (Spanish-English) acquisition context. Also explored whether the source of the interference is due to child-internal crosslanguage contact between English and Spanish or due to the nature of the language input in a bilingual…

An overview of bilingualism and language acquisition is followed by a description of a research study of the simultaneous acquisition of Spanish and English in three children. (RM)

The spontaneous speech of a six-year-old bilingual child was analyzed for this study. The child has lived in the United States and English is her primary language but her parents speak only French in the home and she has spent several months in France during three visits there. The data used in this study were collected in the child's home by her…

This paper focuses on lexical mixing and language switching in a French-English bilingual Canadian child. (CHK)

This study attempts to determine whether the syntactic errors children make while learning a second language are due to native language interference or to developmental cognitive strategies, as has been found in first language acquisition. (Author)

The subject of this article is a Cantonese-speaking infant who arrived in the U.S. at 16 months. At 19 months, three striking anomalies marked her Cantonese speech. These anomalies are discussed; it is proposed that their origin may have been her new English-speaking environment. (CHK)

Studies the acquisition of the morphological rules for plural, agentive, and demonstrative suffixes in Dutch. Native-speaking and second language learning children were studied. Both groups showed acquisition orders for plural and agentive, and the second-language group showed interference in acquiring the agentive. Morphological acquisition thus…

Results of a 10-item oral language test presented only orally, orally with pictures, and orally with concrete aids replicate earlier research findings showing that bilingual children manipulate language more easily than unilinguals. Unilinguals' errors were due to incomplete development while bilinguals' were caused by that and first-language…

The thesis of the paper is that the process of learning a second language, if successful, is the same as that of learning a first one. The paper discusses various objections that have been raised against this thesis, and it discusses the considerable body of research which explores it. It examines the appropriateness of the research data for…

Results of a study of sound system acquisition of five-year-old students of English-as-a-second-language show that first- and second-language learners exhibit similar but not identical simplification processes, and that evidence for a common developmental sequence in acquisition of consonant sounds was limited. (MSE)

This study analyzes a corpus of 1500 sentences uttered by a child bilingual in Italian and German between the ages of 3.9 and 4.5. Only 89 sentences show instances of lexical interference. (CFM)

Participants in a seminar series in second language acquisition held at Harvard University discussed three papers by Dulay and Burt ("Goofing: An Indicator of Children's Second Language Learning Strategies,""Should We Teach Children Syntax?", "Natural Sequences in Child Second Language Acquisition"), and developed…