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)

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

The learning and retention performances of children and adults were compared on free and serialized reproductions of meaningful words. Although the children took longer than the adults to reach the learning criterion, and short-term retention was equivalent for both groups, the children displayed a superior serial recall at 7-day retention.…

Implicit in the discussion of views taken by Wolfe, Geschwind, and Newmark is a claim that no learning theory based solely on "nurture" can account for the fact that language acquisition in childhood is a trait, in adulthood a skill. The child can master the language system completely, regardless of his intellectual capacity or his social…

Discussed in this paper are reasons why people who speak second languages may not speak or write them with native-speaker-like fluency. These second-language deficiencies may be the results of (1) interference, the use of aspects of another language at a variety of levels; (2) strategies of learning such as over overgeneralization and analogy by…

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…

Recommends that language teaching be organized by complexity of communication tasks rather than by difficulty of linguistic structure, that learner speech be analyzed on its own terms borrowing methods from child language studies, and that the adjustments in speech that teachers make in talking to students be recognized as such. (MLA)

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…

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…

A description of language acquisition and second language learning by adults in terms of method and achievement. Some socio-psychological and neurophysiological reasons for the possible differences between children and adults are briefly discussed. There is a sizable bibliography. (AMH)

The use of formulaic speech is seen as a learning strategy in children's first language (L1) acquisition to a limited extent, and to an even greater extent in their second language (L2) acquisition. While the first utterances of the child learning L1 are mostly one-word constructions, many of them are routine words or phrases that the child learns…

A study was conducted of the language development of a hearing child whose mother was deaf and communicated only in sign and whose father was hearing and communicated in both sign and oral language. Results showed similarities in development between the two modalities as well as similarity between development in two separate modalities and two…

Three stages of the developing second language of a 3;9-3;11 year-old English-speaking child in an Urdu speech milieu were examined and compared with findings that have been accumulated about the order and process of first language acquisition. The study showed that in the development of many syntactic and morphological features the child used…

The development of German proficiency by a three-year-old Australian boy living in Germany was monitored for a five-month period. His command of German negation is reported. The study is seen as bearing on issues in first and second language acquisition, such as competence and interference. (JB)