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Reexamining the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis: What Can Early Bilinguals Tell Us?
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Montrul, Silvina – Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2009
The fundamental difference hypothesis (FDH), as formulated by Bley-Vroman (1990), claims that SLA tends to be nonconvergent because domain-specific linguistic mechanisms available in early childhood cannot be used for language learning in adulthood: Instead, second language (L2) learners deploy domain-general problem solving skills. I claim that…
Descriptors: Second Language Learning, Children, Bilingualism, Linguistic Theory
How Similar Are Adult Second Language Learners and Spanish Heritage Speakers? Spanish Clitics and Word Order
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Montrul, Silvina – Applied Psycholinguistics, 2010
Recent studies of heritage speakers, many of whom possess incomplete knowledge of their family language, suggest that these speakers may be linguistically superior to second language (L2) learners only in phonology but not in morphosyntax. This study reexamines this claim by focusing on knowledge of clitic pronouns and word order in 24 L2 learners…
Descriptors: Suprasegmentals, Heritage Education, Second Language Learning, Word Order
Gender Agreement in Adult Second Language Learners and Spanish Heritage Speakers: The Effects of Age and Context of Acquisition
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Montrul, Silvina; Foote, Rebecca; Perpinan, Silvia – Language Learning, 2008
This study investigates knowledge of gender agreement in Spanish L2 learners and heritage speakers, who differ in age and context/mode of acquisition. On some current theoretical accounts, persistent difficulty with grammatical gender in adult L2 acquisition is due to age. These accounts predict that heritage speakers should be more accurate on…
Descriptors: Second Language Learning, Spanish, Language Acquisition, Age