This issue of the "SLANT" Newsletter for researchers in second language acquisition is highlighted by a report of research on second language acquisition by immigrant workers in West Germany (including research in progress and a bibliography). Also included are reports from various language acquisition conferences; a listing of summer…

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…

This paper outlines the development of an exciting set of changes going on in the field of linguistics at the present time. From studies of the ethnography of communication, generative semantics, variation theory, and pidgins and creoles has come a convergence of interests which highlights the concept of gradatum (rather than continuum) in…

This article discusses the psychology of second language learning, and specifically comments on Gantier's book on the teaching of foreign languages. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Posits that a child's success in acquiring English may depend to a large degree on his or her proficiency in the heritage language. (CB)

Tests on children between five and nine led to the conclusion that children's ability to recognize synonymous structures is progressively developed over a period of years and that there is a scale of difficulty involved. Paper presented at the National Association for Foreign Student Affairs Annual Conference, May 1969. (FWB)

Investigates whether the aspect-before-tense hypothesis accounts for the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology in child second language English. Addressed whether early uses of tense-aspect inflections can be analyzed as a spell-out of semantic/aspectual features of verbs. Data are from a longitudinal study of an 8-year-old Russian-speaking child…

Re-examines research literature supporting the idea that infants and young children simultaneously learning two languages mix elements from the two languages. It is argued that, contrary to most extant interpretations, bilingual children develop differentiated language systems from the beginning and are able to use their developing languages in…

Examines code-switching and code-mixing behavior of a child learning English and Cantonese simultaneously. The choice of code was dependant on socialization, and code-mixing was dependent on base language. (14 references) (LT)

Analyzes an ethnographic study of child second language (L2) learning, focusing on the disputes that two of the children engaged in. Data reveal how these language events both reflected and helped shape the identities of the children in ways that influenced their opportunities for L2 learning. (Author/VWL)

Investigates whether knowing more than one language enhances the learning of lexical items and syntactic constructions in other languages. Multilingual (M1) students outperformed unilinguals in both types of acquisition, suggesting that M1s' heightened metalinguistic skills, enhanced lexical knowledge, and a less conservative learning procedure…

This paper investigates object omission in French longitudinal production from two English-speaking children (Lightbown, 1977). Similar patterns of object omission are observed: direct objects start being dropped as transitive verbs are emerging and licit and illicit null objects occur in all recordings thereafter. Moreover, the incidence of…

The vocabulary development in the first 11 weeks of English acquisition by a 5-year-old Japanese girl was studied. The girl and her mother (a linguistic researcher) arrived in the United States at the start of the study. Lexical data from a language diary kept by the mother and from adult and peer sessions were pooled to produce a chronological…