The present study examines the production and intuition of Spanish clitics in clitic left dislocation (CLLD) structures among 26 Spanish heritage speakers (HSs) born and raised in Brazil. We tested clitic production and intuition in contexts in which Spanish clitics vary as a function of the semantic features of the object that they refer to.…

Purpose: This study examined whether the language sample elicitation technique (i.e., storytelling and story-retelling tasks with pictorial support) affects lexical diversity (D), grammaticality (grammatical errors per communication unit [GE/CU]), sentence length (mean length of utterance in words [MLUw]), and sentence complexity (subordination…

The present article provides an exploration of ultimate attainment in second language (L2) and its limitations. It is argued that the question of maturational constraints can best be investigated when the reference population is bilingual and exposed on a regular basis to varieties of their first language (L1) that show cross-linguistic influence.…

Measures of productivity and sentence organization are useful metrics for quantifying language development and language impairments in monolingual and bilingual children. It is not yet known what measures within and across languages are most informative when evaluating the language skills of bilingual children. The purpose of this study was to…

Statistical analyses of the incidence of "what"-questions requiring variably complex responses are presented. The responses were asked of a bilingual child by different sets of caretakers in English and German over a one-year period starting at age 16 months. Results show that the caretakers' questions are geared first toward the child's…

Describes two grammaticality judgment tasks--one in French and one in English--developed based on differences between the two languages vis-a-vis middle constructions. The tasks were administered to Anglopone and Francophone advanced and very advanced learners of their second language, and to unilingual groups with the same first languages.…

Argues that a pattern analogous to that in speech errors also appears in intrasentential code-switching, i.e., the alternating use of two languages in a sentence by bilinguals. Notes that studies of spontaneous conversation of bilinguals indicate that open class items may be code-switched, but closed class items may not. (41 references) (Author/CK)

Developmental data from the acquisition of English by a German child, aged 5, are analyzed with a view to identifying structural conditions that give rise to interference, and to determine which L2 structures are affected and which structures govern developmental changes. Word order in German and English sentences ahve reflexes in different…

The acquisition of Irish as a second language in a four-year-old child of bilingual parents attending an Irish-language preschool group in Ireland is chronicled, with emphasis on the characteristic features of her language learning process and the factors determining which language she uses with others. The study was based on transcribed…

The prerequisites of language acquisition are cognitive and pragmatic. The child's conceptual development and social needs direct his attention to particular linguistic forms. These provide an efficient selection device enabling the child to match his language learning task with his abilities. The second language learner who is cognitively and…

This discussion of the use of computer programming in syntactic analysis covers three major points: (1) a review of basic notions in automatic grammars; (2) a description of the grammar used in a pilot project which analysed the linguistic content of methods of teaching foreign languages; and (3) proposals on the application of the same techniques…

A study examined the acquisition of negation in English as a Second Language in a 4-year-old Salvadoran girl, a native speaker of Spanish. Specifically, the study looked for evidence of language transfer in bilingual acquisition and the direction of that transfer (Spanish to English, English to Spanish). Over 5 months, spontaneous speech (55…

The purpose of this paper is to review recent Soviet research on the child's development of Russian grammar, with detailed information on valuable methods for investigating this process. Cross-linguistic comparisons are made where applicable in view of their relevance for the study of universal aspects of language acquisition and linguistic…

This collection of studies in contrastive linguistics includes the following: "Bilingual Intralinguistic Orthographic Interference" (Philip A. Luelsdorff); "Reassociation of Sentence Melodies" (Wolfgang U. Dressler, Lavinia Merlini Barbaresi); "English Word Stress and Empty Vowel Slots" (Grazyna Rowicka);…