Reports on bilingual acquisition of syntax. Draws on data from a bilingual English-Dutch child whose word order patterns testify to the fact that movement never occurs beyond the target and when deviant word orders are attested they result from lack of raising. (Author/VWL)

Study of the German attrition of two Turkish girls who returned to Turkey after residing in Germany found that attrition stages (slower speech and code-switching; lexical attrition; and basic grammar) were largely a mirror-image of a Turkish boy's acquisition of German while residing in Germany. (14 references) (Author/CB)

Addresses the fate of languages acquired during childhood that have not been used in a long time to find out if they are lost, overridden by other languages acquired later, or maintained despite a lack of use. German subjects were tested for their knowledge of Dutch, which they acquired as a second language during childhood. (Author/VWL)

Exploration of the extent to which acculturation may be related to classroom second-language acquisition in Turkish immigrant children reared in the Netherlands found that the relationship was significant and positive, but not really high. (Author/CB)

Comparison of temporal system acquisition between native English-speaking children and Polish adults learning English revealed that, although native learners comprehended absolute temporal contrasts first and relative components later, the second language-learners' initial temporal systems had both absolute and relative dimensions. (36 references)…

Results of a survey of 200 parents attending baby and child clinics in North Wales show that parents know less about language development than about other areas of child development. Results suggest that both monolingual and bilingual parents and their children would benefit from improved information on how to facilitate language development. (43…

Basque auxiliary verbs encode tense, agreement relations with ergative, absolutive, and dative arguments, which constitute an inflectional verbal amalgam whose acquisition is not problematic for Spanish-speaking children but is for Spanish-speaking adults. This asymmetry is due to different processes by which the inflectional amalgam is acquired.…

This study compared narratives in Spanish, Basque, and English of a 5-year-old trilingual child. The child produced narratives of a familiar story, learned through an English video recording, in each language while looking at a printed version of the story. All interlocutors were adult native speakers of the languages, well known to the child. The…

Describes one aspect of a Welsh/English bilingual child being raised in England. The father is a native speaker of Welsh, and the mother has learned Welsh in order to speak it to her son. The father accommodates both the mother's and the child's linguistic errors. Areas of accommodation are identified and possible reasons discussed. (Author/LMO)

A case study of a native-English-speaking child's acquisition of Hebrew through immersion in daycare found that a period of silence was followed by a rapid onset of second-language production. Eight types of language awareness were identified, with conclusions drawn about their role as prerequisites for starting second-language production. (58…

A case study analyzed the babbling and speech production of an infant, aged 20 to 24 months, whose family members spoke Portuguese, English, and French interchangeably. Focus was on vowel production, choice of lexicon, and the relationship between babbling and speech in the interaction of his languages. The child's utterances were recorded in…

A microethnographic study and intervention were conducted in a mixed-age preschool classroom with 3- to-5-year-old native speakers of English, Khmer, and Spanish. All were learning English and had native-language support. In the study's first phase, the language of five children was audiotaped during play time. In the second phase, the whole…

Examines a series of naturally-occurring phone calls between a young child and his grandmother in the child's second language (L2), Portuguese. Notes that during the calls the child's L2 appears to increase in complexity, but is subsequently abandoned. Argues that this abandonment requires an examination of the language's role in the larger…

Analysis of the responses of monolingual Dutch and bilingual Turkish, Moroccan, and Surinamese children living in the Netherlands to word association and sorting tasks revealed no significant differences among the groups. Results of the study indicated that bilingualism does not affect cognitive-linguistic development. (22 references) (Author/VWL)

To study lexical knowledge relevant for school success, 40 monolingual Dutch and 40 bilingual Turkish 9 and 11-year olds were asked to explain the meanings of common Dutch nouns in an extended word definition task. Compared to the monolingual Dutch children, the bilingual Turkish children allotted less extensive and varied meanings to Dutch words.…