Purpose: Over the last decades, many studies have documented the clinical potential of nonword repetition (NWR) tasks for detecting developmental language disorder in mono- (MON) and bilingual (BIL) children by unveiling their difficulties in short-term memory and phonological accuracy. However, the precise nature of the nonwords to be used and…

A recurring question in the literature of heritage language acquisition, and more generally of bilingual acquisition, is whether all linguistic domains are sensitive to input reduction and to cross-linguistic influence and to what extent. According to the Interface Hypothesis, morphosyntactic phenomena regulated by discourse-pragmatic conditions…

There are differences and similarities between Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and spoken varieties of Arabic, in all language domains. To obtain preliminary insights into interactions between the acquisition of spoken and standard varieties of a language in a diglossic situation, we employed forced-choice grammaticality judgments to investigate…

The ability of children to process words printed in a second language was studied over the course of a school year as the children acquired increasing familiarity with the language. The children, ranging in age from 5 to 15 years, represented four ability groups with respect to their reading skills in their first and second languages. A…

Paper presented to the Michigan Linguistic Society, Mount Pleasant, Michigan, October 4, 1969. Theorizes that the nature of the brain, not its nurture, inhibits the ability of a person to master the sound patterns of a second language without an accent. (DS)

Productive errors in the Spanish of 3 Spanish-speaking children and 115 adults learning Spanish as a second language are analyzed. The errors are organized into three categories--lexical, morphological, and syntactic--and each category is further divided according to the type of cognitive error-processing strategy shown: simplification, reduction…

Discusses areas in which Chinese children will experience conflict between Chinese and English culture and language that will create learning difficulties. (CFM)

The consensus of opinion seems to be that the processes of mother tongue acquisition are essentially analogous to those of second language (SL) acquisition. These processes, however, seem to work best in childhood years. A theory of adult SL learning should try to incorporate interlanguage. (CFM)

Describes an investigation of the phonetic characteristics of children's second language acquisition, focusing on acoustical correlates of the voicing contrast for stop consonants, as produced by young native speakers of Arabic who were learning English as a second language. Neither age nor experience with English could predict phonetic…

This report discusses a study of a Norwegian six-year-old child's acquisition of English syntax in a second language environment. Interrogative and negative sentences which require periphrasis with "do" are the forms considered in the analysis. Although the formal aim of the study is limited to an effort at discovering more about developmental…

Discusses problems and issues in naturalistic (non-school) acquisition of the phonology of a second language (L2). The data come from a longitudinal study of four German-speaking siblings learning English as a second language within an English-speaking community without classroom instruction. (KM)

Examines predictors of accent transfer from L1 to L2 in a group whose acquisition of English as a second language had begun at ages ranging from 6 to 15 plus. Discusses effects of age on L2 acquisition, adding that the only other strong factor was whether L2 was used in the home. (Author/MES)

A collection of papers addresses three aspects of the learning and use of French as a second language in Africa. The first two chapters look at the sociolinguistic dimension; the first examines the language question and language consciousness in parts of Africa where French was once or is still used as an official or "second" language.…

Essays on language transfer in language learning include: excerpts from "Linguistics across Cultures" (Robert Lado); "Language Transfer" (Larry Selinker); "Goofing: An Indication of Children's Second Language Learning Strategies" (Heidi C. Dulay, Marina K. Burt); "Language Transfer and Universal Grammatical Relations" (Susan Gass); "A Role for the…

The experiment described in this report considers whether children who learn a second language will develop the same semantic system as monolingual children or whether their semantic system will be different because of linguistic or cultural interference, and also whether the bilingual child develops separate meaning systems for his two languages…