We examined case-marking variation in heritage Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Comparing heritage to homeland Polish and Ukrainian speakers, we found only a few types and a few tokens of systematic distinction between heritage and homeland varieties. A total of 6,291 instances of nouns and pronouns were extracted from transcribed conversations…

The ability to acquire language is a critical part of human development. Yet there is no consensus on how the skill emerges in early development. Does it constitute an innately-specified, language-processing module or is it acquired progressively? One of Annette Karmiloff-Smith's (1938-2016) key contributions to developmental science addresses…

In this plenary paper, we present a review of language research in children with cochlear implants along with an outline of a 5-year project designed to examine the lexical access for production and recognition. The project will use auditory priming, picture naming with auditory or visual interfering stimuli (Picture-Word Interference and…

Second language acquisition (SLA) is a relatively new field of enquiry. Before the late 1960s, educators did write about L2 learning, but very much as an adjunct of language teaching pedagogy, underpinned by behaviourism, the then-dominant learning theory in psychology. In this view, the task facing learners of foreign languages was to rote-learn…

Previous studies on second language (L2) acquisition of English dative alternation by Korean speakers (Oh and Zubizarreta, 2003, 2006a, 2006b) have shown that the acquisition of English benefactive double object (DO) (e.g. "John baked Mary a cake") lags behind that of its counterpart goal double object (e.g. "John sent Mary the letter"). This…

This study investigates the issue of crosslinguistic influence in the domain of subject realization in Turkish in simultaneous acquisition of Turkish and English. The use of subjects in a null subject language like Turkish is a phenomenon linked to the pragmatics-syntax interface of the grammar and, thus, is a domain where crosslinguistic…

This article presents a selective review of previous research findings on first language (L1) attrition. The review is intentionally limited in scope as it only discusses studies on morphosyntactic attrition in the L1 grammar of adult bilinguals. To this end--and in order to present the most current line of research in this field--I first report…

Describes the development of the concept of language in an Italian/English bilingual child from age 2.0 to 2.5 years. (CFM)

Presents three interrelated theses on the mechanisms underlying developmental and transfer errors, and exemplifies these with reference to a number of English L2 developmental structures. Proposes a framework where linguistic factors play a major role in protracting the restructuring of the preverbal negation rule by Spanish learners. (Author/MES)

Research on the role of the first language (L1) in second language (L2) learning is reviewed, offering historical background but focusing primarily on work within the last two decades. Attention is given mainly to two aspects of the L1-L2 relationship: positive transfer of knowledge from L1 in the process of learning L2, and negative transfer, or…

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…

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)

A definition of bilingualism can include speakers of different languages as well as those who speak several dialects or several sub-varieties of dialects in the same language. Most speakers are able to practice code-switching, whether it is from language to language or dialect to dialect, and the processes involved in such a capability may be the…