Having orally proficient Spanish speaking heritage learners in a class alongside monolingual English speakers who are learning Spanish as a second language is quite the challenge: the heritage learners' ability to converse can be intimidating to the non heritage learner, but at the same time, the non heritage learner's ability to grasp the grammar…

English language predictors of English and French reading development were investigated in a group of 140 children who were enrolled in French immersion programs. Children were first tested in kindergarten, and their reading achievement was tested yearly in both English and French from Grades 1 to 3, with word-level and passage-level measures that…

This study compared the use of English past tense in a group of Spanish-English bilingual children with language impairment (BLI) to younger groups of bilinguals with typical and atypical language development reported in an earlier study. Ten children with BLI enrolled in 3rd-6th grade participated. Children supplied 12 regular, 12 irregular, and…

The present study examines classroom learners' course of grammatical development in acquiring the interpretive correlates of variable adjective position in French. Eventual attainment of the target language system requires not only knowledge of linear word-order possibilities within the determiner phrase that differ from their native language…

In this paper I claim that there is evidence of grammatical interference in the development of ergative case in bilingual children acquiring Basque and Spanish. While both monolingual and bilingual children have difficulty acquiring the ergative case in Basque (Barrena, 1995; Ezeizabarrena, 1996), my results indicate that bilingual children omit…

We report the results from two experiments investigating proficient Japanese-speaking learners' processing of reflexive object pronouns in English as a second language (L2). Experiment 1 used a timed grammaticality judgement task to assess learners' sensitivity to binding Principle A under processing pressure, and Experiment 2 investigated the…

Recent research shows that speakers of languages with obligatory plural marking (English) preferentially categorize objects based on common shape, whereas speakers of nonplural-marking classifier languages (Yucatec and Japanese) preferentially categorize objects based on common material. The current study extends that investigation to the domain…

Drawing on data from eleven preschools in four European countries (Germany, Belgium, Sweden, and the UK), this edited volume explores the progress of preschool children learning English over a period of two years. In the first volume, children's lexical and grammatical comprehension, the quality of L2 input, the effect of immersion on L1…

This study reports on a comparison of the use and knowledge of tense-marking morphemes in English by first language (L1), second language (L2), and specific language impairment (SLI) children. The objective of our research was to ascertain whether the L2 children's tense acquisition patterns were similar or dissimilar to those of the L1 and SLI…

Any person who has taught Spanish as a second language or who has interacted with a non-native speaker of Spanish can easily tell that mastering the correct use of the copulas "ser" and "estar" is very difficult in both spoken and written production. But L2 learners are not alone. The Spanish copulas also present difficulty and frustration for L2…

Drawing on data from eleven preschools in four European countries (Germany, Belgium, Sweden, and the UK), this edited volume explores the progress of preschool children learning English over a period of two years. This edited volume (Volume II) gives details on best practices in bilingual preschools as well as background and training on topics…

Parent report instruments adapted from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) examined vocabulary development in children aged 0 ; 8 to 2 ; 6 for two Chinese languages, Mandarin (n = 1694) and Cantonese (n = 1625). Parental reports suggested higher overall scores for Mandarin- than for Cantonese-speaking children from…

The obligatory use of the preposition a with animate, specific direct objects in Spanish ("Juan conoce a Maria" "Juan knows Maria") is a well-known instance of Differential Object Marking (DOM; Torrego, 1998; Leonetti, 2004). Recent studies have documented the loss and/or incomplete acquisition of several grammatical features in Spanish heritage…

The purpose of this study was two-fold: it primarily intended to incorporate some insights into the newly-explored field of L3A: secondly, it aimed to highlight the significance of translation as a valid language activity in exploring the native language influence on non-native language acquisition process. To this end, it investigated the…

A comparison of the error profiles of monolingual (child L1) learners of Dutch, Moroccan children (child L2) and Moroccan adults (adult L2) learning Dutch as their L2 shows that participants in all groups massively overgeneralize [-neuter] articles to [+neuter] contexts. In all groups, the reverse gender mistake infrequently occurs. Gender…