Studies in Bilingualism

This volume collects research on language, cognition, and communication in multilingualism. Apart from theoretical concerns including grammatical description, language-specific analyses, and modeling of multilingualism, different fields of study and research interests center around three core themes: The Early Years (aspects of language acquisition and development, including vernaculars or minority languages, reading, writing, and cognition, and multilingual extensions), Issues in Everyday Life (the role of multilingualism in and for speech–language–communication difficulties, including diagnosis, provisions of services, and later language breakdown), and From the Past to the Future (aspects of multilingualism beyond acquisition, education, or pathology, with a focus on heritage languages and translanguaging). Specialists from each of these areas introduce state-of-the-art research, novel experimental studies, and/or quantitative as well as qualitative data bearing on ‘multifaceted multilingualism’. There is a broad spectrum for take-home messages, ranging from new theoretical analyses or approaches to assess multilingual speakers all the way to recommendations for policy-makers.

To date, the field of L3 acquisition research has had a heavy focus on the initial state of the L3 grammar. While this initial state research is critical to understanding L3 acquisition as a whole, in order for an explanatory understanding of language acquisition in the multilingual mind, the field needs to expand its scope beyond this area of focus. This volume brings together L3 acquisition and multilingualism researchers in order to discuss the state of the field and introduce new ideas related to the development of post-initial L3 knowledge, and the relationship among languages in the multilingual mind. It includes contributions related to syntactic, phonological, and lexical development beyond the L3 initial state. The purpose of this volume is to expand the current academic discussions within this field, by emphasizing the role of the developmental process in an L3 context, with the hope of inspiring further research in this domain.

Bilingualism is a ubiquitous global phenomenon. Beyond being a language experience, bilingualism also entails a social experience, and it interacts with development and learning, with cognitive and neural consequences across the lifespan. The authors of this volume are world renowned experts across several subdisciplines including linguistics, developmental psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. They bring to light bilingualism’s cognitive, developmental, and neural consequences in children, young adults, and older adults. This book honors Ellen Bialystok, and highlights her profound impact on the field of bilingualism research as a lifelong experience. The chapters are organized into four sections: The first section explores the complexity of the bilingual experience beyond the common characterization of “speaking multiple languages.” The next section showcases Ellen Bialystok’s earlier impact on psychology and education; here the contributors answer the question “how does being bilingual shape children’s development?” The third section explores cognitive and neuroscientific theories describing how language experience modulates cognition, behavior, and brain structures and functions. The final section shifts the focus to the impact of bilingualism on healthy and abnormal aging and asks whether being bilingual can stave off the effects of dementia by conferring a “cognitive reserve.”

Gender as a morphosyntactic feature is arguably “an endlessly fascinating linguistic category” (Corbett 2014: 1). One may even say it is among “the most puzzling of the grammatical categories” (Corbett 1991: 1) that has raised probing questions from various theoretical and applied perspectives. Most languages display semantic and/or formal gender systems with various degrees of opacity and complexity, and even closely related languages present distinct differences, creating difficulties for second language learners. The first three chapters of this volume present critical reviews in three different areas – gender assignment in mixed noun phrases, subtle gentle biases and the gender acquisition in child and adult heritage speakers of Spanish – while the next six chapters present new empirical evidence in the acquisition of gender by bilingual children, adult L2/L3 learners and heritage speakers of various languages such as Italian, German, Dutch or Mandarin-Italian.

This volume consists of a well-integrated collection of original research articles and theoretical/overview papers on second language (L2) input processing. The primary contributors are former students of Bill VanPatten from the past three decades, and the collection of articles is intended as a tribute to his career and contribution of bringing processing issues to the center stage of research in second language acquisition (SLA) and instructed SLA. The research and theorizing presented in this volume are the most recent in the field and represent innovations in approaches to L2 processing research, including the use of online methodologies (self-paced reading and eye tracking) in the experimental papers. In addition, the editors are recognized authors and researchers who have published on sentence processing, input processing, and processing instruction, and all three editors are either on editorial boards or are associate editors of major L2 journals.

Comprehension of texts and understanding of questions is a cornerstone of successful human communication. Whilst reading comprehension has been thoroughly investigated in the last decade, there is surprisingly little research on children’s comprehension of picture stories, particularly for bilinguals. This can be partially explained by the lack of cross-culturally robust, cross-linguistic instruments targeting early narration. This book presents an inference-based model of narrative comprehension and a tool that grew out of a large-scale European project on multilingualism. Covering a range of language settings, the book uses the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives to answer the question which narrative comprehension skills (bilingual) children can be expected to master at a certain age, and explores how such comprehension is affected (or not affected) by linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. Linking theory to method, the book will appeal to researchers in linguistics and psychology and graduate students interested in narrative, multilingualism, and language acquisition.

Heritage language bilingualism refers to contexts where a minority language spoken at home is (one of) the first native language(s) of an individual who grows up and typically becomes dominant in the societal majority language. Heritage language bilinguals often wind up with grammatical systems that differ in interesting ways from dominant-native speakers growing up where their heritage language is the majority one. Understanding the trajectories and outcomes of heritage language bilingual grammatical competence, performance, language usage patterns, identities and more related topics sits at the core of many research programs across a wide array of theoretical paradigms. The study of heritage language bilingualism has grown exponentially over the past two decades. This expansion in interest has seen, in parallel, extensions in methodologies applied, bridges built between closely related fields such as the study of language contact and linguistic attrition. As is typical in linguistics, not all languages are studied to the same degree. The present volume showcases what Turkish as a heritage language brings to bear for key questions in the study of heritage language bilingualism and beyond. In many ways, Turkish is an ideal language to be studied because of its large diaspora across the world, in particular Europe. The papers in this volume are diverse: from psycholinguistic, to ethnographic, to classroom-based studies featuring Turkish as a heritage language. Together they equal more than their subparts, leading to the conclusion that understudied heritage languages like Turkish provide missing pieces to the puzzle of understanding the variables that give rise to the continuum of outcomes characteristic of heritage language speakers.

Heritage speakers are a fascinating group of bilinguals with a unique profile. Living abroad as immigrants of the second generation, they speak the language of their own speech community (the heritage language) at home, and the societally dominant language in most other domains. What exactly they know about their heritage language continues to fascinate the research community as well as teachers and other practitioners working with this group. The different contributions cover a large variety of studies into heritage languages spoken in Europe and North America (including Chinese, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish and Turkish). The volume makes a key contribution to the description and explanation of variability in the outcomes of heritage language acquisition, taking into account a wide range of factors which impact on language acquisition. As comparisons are frequently made with monolinguals and foreign language learners, the volume is also highly relevant for researchers working in monolingual language acquisition and foreign language learning and teaching.

Heritage languages, such as the Turkish varieties spoken in Berlin or the Spanish used in Los Angeles, are non-dominant languages, often with little prestige. Their speakers also speak the dominant language of the country they live in. Often heritage languages undergo changes due to their special status. They have received a lot of scholarly attention and provide a link between academic concerns and educational issues. This book takes a language contact perspective: we consider heritage languages from the perspective of their history, their structural properties, and their interaction with other surrounding languages.
The chapter on Bilingual language use has been co-authored by Anne Verschik; the chapter on Processing has been co-authored by Gerrit Jan Kootstra; and the chapter on Papiamentu has been co-authored by Bart Jacobs.

The study of bilingualism has charted a dramatically new, important, and exciting course in the 21st century, benefiting from the integration in cognitive science of theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive psychology (especially work on the higher-level cognitive processes often called executive function or executive control). Current research, as exemplified in this book, advances the study of the effects of bilingualism on executive function by identifying many different ways of being bilingual, exploring the multiple facets of executive function, and developing and analyzing tasks that measure executive function. The papers in this volume (21 chapters), by leading researchers in bilingualism and cognition, investigate the mechanisms underlying the effects (or lack thereof) of bilingualism on cognition in children, adults, and the elderly. They take us beyond the standard, classical, black-and-white approach to the interplay between bilingualism and cognition by presenting new methods, new findings, and new interpretations.

This monograph examines the first syntactic unit in child language by presenting a longitudinal multiple-case study that focuses on the inner structure of nominal expressions in bilingual or monolingual child Spanish. This compilation of case studies offers the first insight on some of the properties of nominal expressions in bilingual or monolingual child Spanish and test some of the current theoretical proposals to analyze the main syntactic properties and operations within the nominal phrase. The findings of the study suggest new directions to address some core questions about monolingual and bilingual language acquisition taking as a point of departure the notion of economy, prevalent in the most recent theoretical discussion. Given the combination of empirical and theoretical discussions, this monograph will be appealing to a broad range of researchers in syntax and language acquisition.

This volume presents a range of studies testing some of the latest models and hypotheses in the field of second/third language acquisition, such as the Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova, 2008, 2016), the Scalpel Model (Slabakova, 2017), and the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace & Serratrice, 2009) to name a few. The studies explore a variety of linguistic properties (e.g., functional morphology, linguistic properties at the syntax-discourse interface) by focusing on distinct populations (L2 acquisition, L3/LN acquisition, Heritage Speakers), while also considering the links between experimental linguistic research, generative linguistics, and, in some cases, language pedagogy. Dedicated to Roumyana Slabakova, each chapter can be directly linked to her work in terms of the empirical testing of extant hypotheses, the formulation of new models and ideas, and her efforts to advance the dialogue between different disciplines and frameworks. Overall, the contributions in the volume bear evidence of Slabakova’s enduring influence in the field as a collaborator, teacher, and researcher.

This collection brings together leading names in the field of bilingualism research to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Studies in Bilingualism series. Over the last 25 years the study of bilingualism has received a tremendous amount of attention from linguists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists. The breadth of coverage in this volume is a testament to the many different aspects of bilingualism that continue to generate phenomenal interest in the scholarly community. The bilingual experience is captured through a multifaceted prism that includes aspects of language and literacy development in child bilinguals with and without developmental language disorders, language processing and mental representations in adult bilinguals across the lifespan, and the cognitive and neurological basis of bilingualism. Different theoretical approaches – from generative UG-based models to constructivist usage-based models – are brought to bear on the nature of bilingual linguistic knowledge. The end result is a compendium of the state-of-the-art of a field that is in constant evolution and that is on an upward trajectory of discovery.

This collection brings together two areas of research that are currently receiving great attention in both scientific and public spheres: cognitive aging and bilingualism. With ongoing media focus on the aging population and the need for activities to forestall cognitive decline, experiences that appear effective in maintaining functioning are of great interest. One such experience is lifelong bilingualism. Moreover, research into the cognitive effects of bilingualism has increased dramatically in the past decade, making it an exciting area of study. This volume combines these issues and presents the most recent research and thinking into the effects of bilingualism on cognitive decline in aging. The contributors are all leading scholars in their field. The result is a state-of-the art collection on the effect of bilingualism on cognition in older populations for both healthy aging and aging with dementia. The papers will be of interest to researchers, students, and health professionals.

This book presents a current state-of-affairs regarding the study of cross-linguistic influence in bilingualism. Taking Hulk and Müller’s (2000) and Müller and Hulk’s (2001) hypotheses on cross-linguistic influence as a starting point, the book exemplifies the shift from the original focus on syntax proper to interfaces and discourse phenomena in the study of bilingualism. It also reflects the enormous increase in different language combinations (including dialects) being investigated, and the use of new methodologies. Moreover, the volume illustrates the growing interdisciplinarity of cross-linguistic influence research, considering extra-linguistic cognitive and social factors besides linguistics. It demonstrates that the time is ripe for a more integrated approach from different disciplines such as theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics to obtain a better understanding of bilingual child acquisition. As such, it is of interest to (psycho/socio)linguists, psychologists and education specialists who study or want to learn about (child) bilingualism.

The chapters in this volume take different approaches to the exploration of language acquisition processes in various populations (monolingual and bilingual first language acquisition, L2 acquisition) and address issues in syntax, morphology, pragmatics, language processing and interface phenomena. This volume is a tribute to Juana M. Liceras’ fundamental and enduring contribution to the field of Spanish Second Language Acquisition (SLA). All the chapters in the volume are linked to or inspired by Juana’s extensive body of work, and, like Juana’s research, they all stand at the crossroads of formal and experimental linguistics. Together, the studies presented in this volume are a reflection of Juana’s impact both as a mentor and as a collaborative researcher while at the same time showcasing current trends and new directions in the field of generative SLA.

Situated within the long-established domain of temporality research in Second Language Acquisition, this book aims to provide an update on recent research directions in the field through a range of papers which explore relatively new territory. Those areas include the expression of modality and counterfactuality, the effect of first language transfer, aspectuo-temporal comprehension, aspectuo-temporal marking at a wider discursive level, and methodological issues in the study of the acquisition of aspect. The studies presented explore English and French as second languages, involving both child and adult learners from a range of first language backgrounds in both instructed and naturalistic learning contexts. The studies draw on both spoken and written data which explore various facets of the learners’ second language comprehension and production. The volume offers new, but complementary insights to previous research, as well as pointing to directions for future research in this burgeoning field of study.

Bringing together contributions from some of the leading experts in the field of Spanish as a Heritage Language, this volume aims to provide an in-depth understanding of current and emerging trends in research and praxis. To this end, the volume is divided into three thematic units. The first unit surveys the study of Spanish heritage speaker bilingualism from a formal/theoretical linguistic point of view. The second unit focuses on issues shaping the current state of affairs in heritage language education. Finally, the third unit maps out future lines of development within heritage language instruction. The wide topical scope within this single volume will undoubtedly provide a valuable resource for researchers, students, and professionals working in different areas of Spanish as a heritage language.

Implicit learning is a fundamental feature of human cognition. Many essential skills, including language comprehension and production, intuitive decision making, and social interaction, are largely dependent on implicit (unconscious) knowledge. Given its relevance, it is not surprising that the study of implicit learning plays a central role in the cognitive sciences. The present volume brings together eminent researchers from a variety of fields (e.g., cognitive psychology, linguistics, education, cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology) in order to assess the progress made in the study of implicit and explicit learning, to critically evaluate key concepts and methodologies, and to determine future directions to take in this interdisciplinary enterprise. The eighteen chapters in this volume are written in an accessible and engaging fashion; together, they provide the reader with a comprehensive snapshot of the exciting current work on the implicit and explicit learning of languages.

Language researchers and practitioners often adopt tools and techniques without testing whether they really work as they should. This is understandable because most scholars do not have the time or expertise to properly evaluate the usefulness of all instruments, measures, and methods they need. It is therefore critical to have problem solvers in the field who gain the necessary expertise and take the time to scrutinize existing methods, identify problems, and offer new solutions. This volume represents the work of scholars who have done this; it is a collection of the latest advances, developments, and innovations regarding the modeling and measurement of learners’ vocabulary growth curves, current levels of vocabulary knowledge and lexical proficiency, and the patterns of lexical diversity found in their language production. Several of the contributors also address the complex but important relationship between automated indices and human judgments of learners’ lexical patterns and abilities.

In recent years, researchers have acknowledged that the study of third language acquisition cannot simply be viewed as an extension of the study of bilingualism, and the present volume’s authors agree that a point of departure that embraces the unique properties that differentiate L2 acquisition from L3/Ln acquisition is essential. From linguistic, sociological, psychological, educational and cognitive viewpoints, it has become increasingly apparent that the study of L3/Ln acquisition can provide new evidence to help resolve ongoing debates in these areas of study. This volume uniquely provides a wide-ranging overview of current trends in the study of adult additive multilingualism from formal, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives, adding new insights into adult multilingual epistemology. This collection includes critical reviews of L3/Ln morphosyntax, phonology, and the lexicon, as well as individual studies with unique language pairings including Romance, Germanic, Slavic, and Asian languages.

This volume brings together for the first time a collection of studies devoted to missionary language learning and retention. Introductory chapters provide historical perspectives on this population and on language teaching philosophy and practice in the LDS tradition. The empirical studies which follow are divided into two sections, the first examining mission language acquisition by English-speaking missionaries abroad, the second focusing on post-mission language attrition. These chapters by internationally known scholars offer cutting-edge research using a number of different target languages in addressing various issues in second language development. Finally, a comprehensive bibliography of sources on mission languages is included. The readership of this pioneering work is expected to extend beyond specialists in study abroad and missionary language training to a broader audience of applied linguists, educators, and students interested in language acquisition and attrition. In addition, the book offers useful insights to adults who want to maintain a second language.

This text provides an overview of bi- and multilingualism as a worldwide phenomenon. It features comprehensive discussions of many of the linguistic, social, political, and educational issues found in an increasingly multilingual nation and world. To this end, the book takes the Chicano-Latino community of Southern California, where Spanish-English bilingualism has over a century and a half of history, and presents a detailed case study, thereby situating the community in a much broader social context. Spanish is the second most-widely spoken language in the U.S. after English, yet, for the most part, its speakers form a language minority that essentially lacks the social, political, and educational support necessary to derive the many cognitive, socioeconomic, and educational benefits that proficient bilingualism can provide. The issues facing Spanish-English bilinguals in the Los Angeles area are relevant to nearly every bi- and multilingual community irrespective of nation, language, and/or ethnicity.

This volume presents an overview of changes in paradigms, perspectives and contexts of research into bilingual development over the past two decades. During this time, the focus of perspective has changed. In the early 1990s, most investigations still proceeded from models that assumed modular components, hierarchical relationships and linear processes, and investigated what were perceived to be the ‘typical’ contexts of bilingual development (sequential, usually instructed bilingualism, where the second language would remain the weaker one and the speakers investigated were typically young adults). More recently it has been proposed that such models may not be complex enough to accommodate bilingual development in all its facets and settings (bimodal bilingualism, attrition, aging). This change has recently culminated in applications of chaos theory to Applied Linguistics, and in the widening range of situations of language acquisition, learning and deterioration which have been investigated.

The present volume represents a variety of portraits of what happens when families attempt to raise children in Spanish while living in English-speaking societies. Aided by the foregrounding chapter by Suzanne Romaine about language and identity and the afterword by Carol Klee that ties together many issues brought up throughout the collection, the reader gains a more complete understanding of the variables that contribute to Spanish bilingualism in English-speaking societies, and by extension a more complete understanding of the dynamic nature of bilingualism in general. This volume, the first of its kind, brings together an impressive array of sociolinguistic environments while keeping the two languages constant. We hope that it marks the beginning of comparative analyses of bilingualism, acquisition outcomes, and identity construction across environments that share the same languages, but where important disparities exist in the sociolinguistic landscapes.

The volume presents a selection of contributions by leading scholars in the field of code-switching. In the past the phenomenon of code-switching was studied within different subfields of linguistics and they all took their own perspectives on code-switching without taking into account findings from other subdisciplines. This book raises a question of a much broader multidisciplinary approach to studying the phenomenon of code-switching; calls for integration of disciplines; and illustrates how frameworks from one subfield can be applied to models in another. The volume includes survey chapters, empirical studies, contributions that use empirical data to test new hypotheses about code-switching, or suggest new approaches and models for the study of code-switching, and chapters that discuss principles and constraints of code-switching, and code-switching vs. transfer. The book is easily accessible to anyone who is interested in the phenomenon of code-switching in bilinguals.

This volume is the outcome of the author’s observations and puzzlement over seventeen years of teaching English and French as second languages, followed by 30 years of research into the neurolinguistic aspects of bilingualism. It examines, within the framework of a neurolinguistic theory of bilingualism (Paradis, 2004), the crucial and pervasive contributions made by declarative and procedural memory to the appropriation, representation and processing of a second language. This requires careful consideration of a number of concepts associated with issues pertaining to second language research: consciousness, interface, modularity, automaticity, proficiency, accuracy, fluency, intake, ultimate attainment, switching, implicit linguistic competence and explicit metalinguistic knowledge. It is informed by data from a variety of domains, including language pathology, neuroimaging, and, from each side of the fence, practical classroom experience. This book introduces four further proposals within the framework of a neurolinguistic theory of bilingualism: (1) There are two sets of cerebral representations, those that are capable of reaching consciousness and those that are not; implicit grammar is inherently not capable of reaching consciousness. (2) The increased activation observed in neuroimaging studies during the use of a second language is not devoted to the processing of implicit linguistic competence. (3) Intake is doubly implicit. (4) Given the premise that metalinguistic knowledge cannot be converted into implicit competence, there can be no possible interface between the two.

Age effects have played a particularly prominent role in some theoretical perspectives on second language acquisition. This book takes an entirely new perspective on this issue by re-examining these theories in light of the existence of apparently similar non-native outcomes in adult heritage speakers who, unlike adult second language learners, acquired two or more languages in childhood. Despite having been exposed to their family language early in life, many of these speakers never fully acquire, or later lose, aspects of their first language sometime in childhood. The book examines the structural characteristics of "incomplete" grammatical states and highlights how age of acquisition is related to the type of linguistic knowledge and behavior that emerges in L1 and L2 acquisition under different environmental circumstances. By underscoring age of acquisition as a unifying factor in the study of L2 acquisition and L1 attrition, it is claimed that just as there are age effects in L2 acquisition, there are also age effects, or even perhaps a critical period, in L1 attrition. The book covers adult L2 acquisition, attrition in adults and in children, and includes a comparison of adult heritage language speakers and second language learners.

This volume provides a unique cross-disciplinary perspective on the external ecological and internal psycholinguistic factors that determine sign bilingualism, its development and maintenance at the individual and societal levels. Multiple aspects concerning the dynamics of contact situations involving a signed and a spoken or a written language are covered in detail, i.e. the development of the languages in bilingual deaf children, cross-modal contact phenomena in the productions of child and adult signers, sign bilingual education concepts and practices in diverse social contexts, deaf educational discourse, sign language planning and interpretation. This state-of-the-art collection is enhanced by a final chapter providing a critical appraisal of the major issues emerging from the individual studies in the light of current assumptions in the broader field of contact linguistics. Given the interdependence of research, policy and practice, the insights gathered in the studies presented are not only of scientific interest, but also bear important implications concerning the perception, understanding and promotion of bilingualism in deaf individuals whose language acquisition and use have been ignored for a long time at the socio-political and scientific levels.

Sociolinguists have been pursuing connections between language and identity for several decades. But how are language and identity related in bilingualism and multilingualism? Mobilizing the most current methodology, this collection presents new research on language identity and bilingualism in three regions where Spanish coexists with other languages. The cases are Spanish-English contact in the United States, Spanish-indigenous language contact in Latin America, and Spanish-regional language contact in Spain. This is the first comparativist book to examine language and identity construction among bi- or multilingual speakers while keeping one of the languages constant. The sociolinguistic standing of Spanish varies among the three regions depending whether or not it is a language of prestige. Comparisons therefore afford a strong constructivist perspective on how linguistic ideologies affect bi/multilingual identity formation.

This volume is a collection of 13 chapters, each devoted to a particular issue that is crucial to our understanding of the way learners acquire, learn, and use an L2 sound system. In addition, it spans both theory and application in L2 phonology. The book is divided into three parts, with each section unified by broad thematic content: Part I, “Theoretical Issues and Frameworks in L2 Phonology,” lays the groundwork for examining L2 phonological acquisition. Part II, “Second Language Speech Perception and Production,” examines these two aspects of L2 speech in more detail. Finally, Part III, “Technology, Training, and Curriculum,” bridges the gap between theory and practice. Each chapter examines theoretical frameworks, major research findings (both classic and recent), methodological issues and choices for conducting research in a particular area of L2 phonology, and major implications of the research findings for more general models of language acquisition and/or pedagogy.

As one of the first books in child second language acquisition (SLA), this book focuses on the core area of tense-aspect morphology, reporting on three L1-Italian children learning L2 English vs. three L1-English children learning L2 Italian. An innovative longitudinal/bidirectional research design, where two languages represent both source and target, show effects of language transfer in learners that, because of their age, still have potential to become native-speakers of the target. An unusual feature of this book is that relevant studies of acquisition of L2 Italian, some heretofore only in Italian, are reviewed, incorporated into the study and made available to a more general audience. Though the main focus is on child SLA, crucial comparisons to both first language acquisition vs. adult SLA are presented. This approach will thus be of interest more generally to readers in first and second language acquisition and child development.

Bilinguals often report that they feel like a different person in their two languages. In the words of one bilingual in Koven’s book, “When I speak Portuguese, automatically, I'm in a different world…it's a different color.” Although testimonials like this abound in everyday conversation among bilinguals, there has been scant systematic investigation of this intriguing phenomenon. Focusing on French-Portuguese bilinguals, the adult children of Portuguese migrants in France, this book provides an empirically grounded, theoretical account of how the same speakers enact, experience, and are perceived by others to have different identities in their two languages. This book explores bilinguals’ experiences and expressions of identity in multicultural, multilingual contexts. It is distinctive in its integration of multiple levels of analysis to address the relationships between language and identity. Koven links detailed attention to discourse form, to participants’ multiple interpretations how such forms become signs of identity, and to the broader macrosociolinguistic contexts that structure participants’ access to those signs. The study of how bilinguals perform and experience different identities in their two languages sheds light on the more general role of linguistic and cultural forms in local experiences and expressions of identity.

This collection of articles provides theoretical foundations and perspectives for language attrition research. Its purpose is to enable investigations of L1 attrition to avail themselves more fully and more fundamentally of the theoretical frameworks that have been formulated with respect to SLA and bilingualism. In the thirteen papers collected here, experts in particular disciplines of bilingualism, such as neurolinguistics, formal linguistics, contact linguistics and language and identity, provide an in-depth perspective on L1 attrition which will make the translation of theory to hypothesis easier for future research.

This collection of studies investigates the individual, micro-psychological, and macro-societal factors that promote or discourage the development of child and young adult heritage language learners’ spoken and written skills in East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean). The research presented in this book is based on empirical data from various learning and social settings in the United States and Canada. The contributors are themselves mostly from East Asian immigrant backgrounds and have worked closely with students from such backgrounds. This book also speaks to the needs for future research within East Asian communities that will (a) promote East Asian heritage language development in applied linguistics, (b) encourage parental, community, and national support for East Asian heritage language development, and (c) improve the teaching of oral and written skills for heritage learners of East Asian languages in various educational settings.

Although it has long been recognized that second language pronunciation is strongly influenced by the native language, second language phonology has only become a recognized area of study during the last thirty years. While English has been the most frequent target language involved, the learners' L1s have varied greatly. This is the first collection to gather together studies involving English learners whose L1 is Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese, two closely-related languages with important phonological differences. The research covers vowel perception and production, syllable simplification strategies, word and compound stress, and vowel reduction. While the papers confirm the important role of the native language, they also shed light on the sometimes subtle and unexpected ways in which this variable interacts with universal markedness relationships to determine the formation of phonetic categories and their use in perception and production. These eleven carefully conducted empirical studies will provide insights for practitioners and stimulate further research.

Seven years ago Manfred Pienemann proposed a novel psycholinguistic theory of language development, Processability Theory (PT). This volume examines the typological plausibility of PT. Focusing on the acquisition of Arabic, Chinese and Japanese the authors demonstrate the capacity of PT to make detailed and verifiable predictions about the developmental schedule for each language. This cross-linguistic perspective is also applied to the study of L1 transfer by comparing the impact of processability and typological proximity. The typological perspective is extended by including a comparison of different types of language acquisition. The architecture of PT is expanded by the addition of a second set of principles that contributes to the formal modeling of levels of processability, namely the mapping of argument-structure onto functional structure in lexical mapping theory. This step yields the inclusion of a range of additional phenomena in the processability hierarchy thus widening the scope of PT.

This volume presents a state-of-the-art descriptive and explanatory analysis of the second language development of Romance tense-aspect systems. It contains new experimental data from adult French, Catalan, Portuguese learners, and Italian children learners. Standing research questions are addressed and pedagogical implications for foreign language classrooms are proposed arguing that there are possible commonalities in the instructional sequences of tense-aspect development in Romance languages. The first chapter presents an overview of current theoretical approaches and a summary of empirical findings. The following four chapters introduce new empirical data from a variety of theoretical perspectives (e.g., the Aspect Hypothesis, the UG/Minimalist framework). Chapter 5 proposes practical pedagogical approaches for the foreign language classroom based on empirical findings. The last chapter summarizes and discusses these findings in order to start elaborating a more comprehensive model of the development of tense-aspect marking in the Romance languages.

This volume provides a state-of-the-art treatment of research on language attrition, the non-pathological loss of a language through lack of exposure. It combines a review of past and present research with in-depth treatments of specific theoretical and methodological issues and reports on individual studies. Special prominence is given to the identification of problematic areas in attrition research, with a view to pointing out possible solutions. The book specifically addresses itself to those who wish to acquaint themselves with the research area of language attrition, providing them with both a thorough overview of the field and a basis on which to build their own research. The combination of experience and an innovative outlook present in this collection, however, make it a valuable source for those familiar with attrition as well. Especially useful to both beginners and veterans is the extensive annotated bibliography.

Spanish/English codeswitching in published work represents a claim to the right to participate in the marketplace on a bilingual and not just monolingual basis. This book offers a syntactic and sociolinguistic analysis of the codeswitching in a corpus of thirty texts: novels and short stories published in the United States by twenty-four authors between 1970-2000. An application of the Matrix Language Frame model shows that written codeswitching follows for the most part the same syntactic patterns as its spoken counterpart. The reasons why some written codeswitching is considered to be artificial or inauthentic are examined. An overview of written codeswitching research is given, including titles of many texts in addition to the corpus that contain codeswitching between diverse languages. The book concludes with a look at how codeswitching is used by writers to attain their objectives, and what the implications may be for the relative positions of Spanish, English, and Spanish/English codeswitching in the United States.

The papers in this volume focus on the impact of information structure on language acquisition, thereby taking different linguistic approaches into account. They start from an empirical point of view, and examine data from natural first and second language acquisition, which cover a wide range of varieties, from early learner language to native speaker production and from gesture to Creole prototypes. The central theme is the interplay between principles of information structure and linguistic structure and its impact on the functioning and development of the learner's system. The papers examine language-internal explanatory factors and in particular the communicative and structural forces that push and shape the acquisition process, and its outcome. On the theoretical level, the approach adopted appeals both to formal and communicative constraints on a learner’s language in use. Two empirical domains provide a 'testing ground' for the respective weight of grammatical versus functional determinants in the acquisition process: (1) the expression of finiteness and scope relations at the utterance level and (2) the expression of anaphoric relations at the discourse level.

This sociolinguistic study of the linguistic practices of bilingual couples describes the conditions, processes and results of private language contact. It is based on a unique corpus of more than 20 hours of private conversations between partners in bilingual marriages. Adding to its breadth of coverage, these private conversations are supplemented with larger public discourses about international couplehood. The volume thus offers a corpus-driven investigation of the ways in which ideologies of gender, nationality and immigration mediate linguistic performances in private cross-cultural communication. The author embraces social-constructionist, feminist and postmodern approaches to second language learning, multilingualism and cross-cultural communication. In contrast to other titles in the field which have focused almost exclusively on the socialization of bilingual children, this book explores what it means to one's sense of self to become socialized into a second language and culture as a late bilingual.

This book is a study of the L1 attrition of German among German Jews who emigrated to anglophone countries under the Nazi regime. It places the study of language attrition within the historical and sociocultural framework of Weimar and Nazi Germany, applying issues of identity and identification to first language loss and maintenance. Morphosyntactic features of German are looked at in free spoken discourse, in an analysis of both ‘interferences’ or ‘errors’ and their overall (correct) use. The picture of L1 proficiency which emerges from these investigations is then related to a taxonomy of intensity of persecution, clearly demonstrating this to be the decisive factor in language attrition, while showing other factors such as age at emigration and intermediate use to be inconclusive.In order to give a full and tangible picture of language attrition and maintenance, the book comes with an Audio-CD, featuring excerpts from more than twenty of the interviews analyzed.

In this volume, the results of a number of empirical studies of the development of narrative construction within a multilingual context are presented and discussed. It is explored what operating principles underlie the process of narrative production in L1 and L2. Developmental relations between form and function will be studied across a broad range of functional categories, such as temporality, perspective, connectivity, and narrative coherence. Moreover, a variety of language contact situations is considered with broad variation in the typological distances between the languages in order to enable cross-linguistic comparison. The analysis of learner data in various cross-linguistic settings may thus offer new information on the role of the structural properties of unrelated languages on the process of narrative acquisition. In the present volume, an attempt is also made to find out how transfer from one language to the other is facilitated. Finally, the effects of input on narrative construction in children’s first and second language are examined in several studies.

This book presents an extended analysis of the development of L2 Spanish past tense morphology among L1 English-speaking learners. The study addresses three major questions: (1) what is the developmental pattern of acquisition of past tense verbal morphology among tutored learners? (2) what are the relevant factors that may account for the particular distribution of morphological endings (especially at the beginning stages)?, and (3) how does instruction affect the movement from one stage to the next? The analysis provides a reassessment of the general claim of Andersen’s lexical aspect hypothesis and proposes minor changes that may render the hypothesis more appropriate for, especially, L2 classroom learning. The study includes an overview of theoretical positions on the notion of lexical versus grammatical aspect, and a comparison of the findings from previous empirical studies on the development of past tense verbal morphology among both classroom and naturalistic learners.

This volume explores the implications of cross-linguistic structures in simultaneous bilingualism. It aims to find cognitive explanations for the presence or absence of cross-linguistic structures that go beyond the debate of ‘one system or two’. The contributors present syntactic, morphological and phonological features that are found in bilingual children, but are untypical of monolingual development, and discuss pertinent methodological issues. The orientation of this volume stands out from competing volumes in the field in that the focus is not limited to similarities between monolingual and bilingual first language acquisition. The volume will be of interest to researchers in the field of bilingualism and primary language acquisition, language theorists, and professionals working with bilingual populations.

This book reports the results of an extensive study of slips of the tongue produced by foreign language (L2) learners at different levels of proficiency. Thus, it provides new data which can be used to test current monolingual models of speech production and to further the development of bilingual speech production models. Moreover, it offers a new approach to the study of second language acquisition. The book contains a detailed survey of the findings of L1 slip research, including studies of slips produced by child L1 learners. It systematically compares these findings to those of the current L2 study and relates them to recent monolingual and bilingual models of speech production and to several cognitive models of second language acquisition. Special features of the book are its emphasis on methodological problems and the inclusion of the complete L2 corpus of 2000 slips of the tongue. It is expected that the book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in the areas of speech production and second language acquisition, and particularly to those who would like to test their own hypotheses using the L2 data.Summary of the contents of the book.
The book provides an overview of the key findings in L1 slip research.
It relates L1 findings to monolingual speech production models.
It gives a detailed survey of studies of slips produced by children.
It presents an up-to-date review of bilingual speech production models.
It discusses recent cognitive models of second language acquisition.
It gives a detailed description of an extensive research project on slips of the tongue produced by Dutch learners of English.
The L2 slip corpus is tape-recorded.
It discusses methodological problems in L1 slip research.
It systematically compares the L1 findings to those of the L2 slip project.
It relates the findings to monolingual and bilingual models of speech production and to cognitive models of second language acquisition.
It makes the data available in the appendix.

This sociolinguistic study describes and analyzes an Israeli Palestinian border village in the Little Triangle and another village artificially divided between Israel and the West Bank, tracing the political transformations that they have undergone, and the accompanying social and cultural changes. These political, social and cultural forces have resulted in distinctive sociolinguistic patterns.
The primary explanation offered for the persisting linguistic frontier found in rural Palestinian communities is the continuing social, political, economic and cultural differences between Palestinian villages in Israel, and Palestinian villages in the West Bank. In the geopolitical and economic history of the villages, these distinctions have been maintained by the dissimilar treatment received by the two communities and their inhabitants under Israeli government policy. Exacerbated by the Palestinian Intifada, the relations of the Palestinian divided communities to each other and to the rest of the world have produced noticeable differences in economic, educational and cultural development. The sociolinguistic facts revealed in the language situation in the villages are study shown to be correlated with political and demographic differences.

This volume is the outcome of 25 years of research into the neurolinguistic aspects of bilingualism. In addition to reviewing the world literature and providing a state-of-the-art account, including a critical assessment of the bilingual neuroimaging studies, it proposes a set of hypotheses about the representation, organization and processing of two or more languages in one brain. It investigates the impact of the various manners of acquisition and use of each language on the extent of involvement of basic cerebral functional mechanisms. The effects of pathology as a means to understanding the normal functioning of verbal communication processes in the bilingual and multilingual brain are explored and compared with data from neuroimaging studies. In addition to its obvious research benefits, the clinical and social reasons for assessment of bilingual aphasia with a measuring instrument that is linguistically and culturally equivalent in each of a patient’s languages are stressed. The relationship between language and thought in bilinguals is examined in the light of evidence from pathology. The proposed linguistic theory of bilingualism integrates a neurofunctional model (the components of verbal communication and their relationships: implicit linguistic competence, metalinguistic knowledge, pragmatics, and motivation) and a set of hypotheses about language processing (neurofunctional modularity, the activation threshold, the language/cognition distinction, and the direct access hypothesis).

This book examines different theoretical perspectives on the role that interaction plays in second language acquisition. The principal perspectives are those afforded by the Interaction Hypothesis, Socio-Cultural Theory and the Levels of Processing model. Interaction is, therefore, defined broadly; it is seen as involving both intermental and intramental activity. The theoretical perspectives are explored empirically in a series of studies which investigate the relationship between aspects of interaction and second language acquisition. A number of these studies consider the effects of interaction on the acquisition of vocabulary (word meanings) by both adult and child L2 learners. In addition, the effects of language aptitude on input processing are considered. Further studies consider the contribution that interaction makes to the acquisition of grammatical knowledge. These studies provide clear evidence that social and intermental interaction are major forces in the acquisition of an L2. Finally, the book, considers a number of pedagogic specifications. In particular, the importance of discourse control as a means of learners’ obtaining the quality of interaction likely to foster acquisition is discussed.

This volume is the result of a colloquium on socio-political dimensions of language policy and language planning held at the 1997 American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) Conference. The focus is on language planning and policy in the USA, but the issues raised will be applicable to other parts of the world as well.
Three broad issues are addressed: general aspects, case studies dealing with certain languages or ethnic groups, and language planning in practice. The first, general, part, provides a historical analysis of language planning and language policy in the US, and proceeds to deal with maintenance and loss of indigenous languages, and the constraints imposed by current policies and how these constraints can be effectively dealt with. The second part contains a number of case studies. It discusses aspects of planning policies pertaining to pidgin languages, gestural languages used by the deaf (ASL) and constraints in foreign language education; this part also raises issues relating to ethnic groups, concentrating on the position of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in the US. In the third part some practical issues are raised by looking into the role of language and culture in teaching reading, foreign language policy in higher education, Hawaiian language regenisis, and gender neutralization in American English.
The book is a tribute to Charlene Junko Sato, a sociolinguist and a language activist. She died in 1996 and will be remembered for her work not only in linguistics, but also for her dedication in advancing Hawaiian Pidgin, influencing language policy through various publications and court-room appearances.

This book marks a new development in the field of second language acquisition research. It explores the way in which language processing mechanisms shape the course of language development. Language Processing and Second Language Development thus adds one major psychological component to the search for a theory of second language acquisition.
The core of the book is Pienemann’s Processability Theory which spells out which second language forms are processable at which developmental stage. The theory is based on recent research into language processing and is formalised within Lexical-Functional Grammar.
The predictions of the theory are applied to the second language development of English, German, Japanese and Swedish. The theory is also tested in on-line experiments. In addition, Processability Theory has major implications for interlanguage variation (including task variation) and age-related differences in language acquisition. All of these issues are explored from a processing perspective with theoretical and empirical rigor.

This book brings together a collection of current research on the assessment of oral proficiency in a second language. Fourteen chapters focus on the use of the language proficiency interview or LPI to assess oral proficiency. The volume addresses the central issue of validity in proficiency assessment: the ways in which the language proficiency interview is accomplished through discourse.Contributors draw on a variety of discourse perspectives, including the ethnography of speaking, conversation analysis, language socialization theory, sociolinguistic variation theory, human interaction research, and systemic functional linguistics. And for the first time, LPIs conducted in German, Korean, and Spanish are examined as well as interviews in English.
This book sheds light on such important issues as how speaking ability can be defined independently of an LPI that is designed to assess it and the extent to which an LPI is an authentic representation of ordinary conversation in the target language. It will be of considerable interest to language testers, discourse analysts, second language acquisition researchers, foreign language specialists, and anyone concerned with proficiency issues in language teaching and testing.

The Brule Dwellers of Ascension Parish are descendants of Canary Island immigrants who came to Louisiana in the late 1700s. A few residents in and around the Ascension Parish area still speak an archaic dialect of Spanish which is at the brink of linguistic extinction. Because the Brule dialect is in the final stages of what is commonly known as “language death”, the case of Brule Spanish presents an exciting opportunity to investigate commonly held assumptions regarding the structural changes often associated with vestigial languages. Its relative isolation from other dialects of Spanish for over two hundred years serves as a sort of linguistic “time capsule” which provides information that is relevant to critical outstanding issues in Hispanic dialectology and historical linguistics. In addition to examining these issues, documenting the specific characteristics of Brule Spanish, and comparing Brule Spanish with other modern Spanish dialects, this book presents a very accessible introduction to the field of language death.

Bilingual codeswitching is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon, which calls for explanations on several different linguistic levels. This volume focuses on one such level: the level of syntax. An explanation for the regularities and consistencies in the codeswitching patterns of American Finns in their spontaneous conversations is sought for in the Universal Grammar -based principle of government as realized in case-assignment and agreement relations. A bulk of the Finnish-English intrasentential data get their explanation on the structural, hierarchical level, but this level of syntax is found to be interestingly intertwined with sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, and discourse levels, which all contribute to variation in codeswitching patterns. The proposed principle of government is seen as one important explanation in typologically certain kinds of language pairs such as Finnish and English; however, this principle is not treated as a monolithic constraint, but rather as the leading tendency which is occasionally overridden by other than syntactic forces.
The volume is intended as a complement — not as a contradiction — to earlier explanations of codeswitching phenomena. Its main message is: while all linguistic levels contribute to the construction of bilingual speech, the importance of syntax can not be ignored.

This book is the third to appear in the SIBIL series based on results from the European Science Foundation's Additional Activity on the second language acquisition of adult immigrants. It analyses from a longitudinal and cross-linguistic perspective the acquisition of the linguistic means to express spatial relations in the target languages English, French and German. Learners' progress in the expression of spatial relations is closely followed over a period of 30 months using a wide range of oral data, and the factors determining both the specifics of individual source/target language pairings, and the general characteristics of all cases of acquisition studied, are carefully described. In particular, a basic system for the expression of spatial relations common to all learners from all language backgrounds is identified. The book is of particular significance for the field of second language acquisition in that this is the first time that results are presented in English on the acquisition of L2 means to express the basic cognitive — and communicational — category of space from a comparative linguistic point of view.

This volume corrects the relative neglect in Second Language Acquisition studies of the quantitative study of language variation and provides insights into such issues as language transfer, acquisition through exposure, language universals, learner’s age and so forth.
These studies bolster the idea that a full account of SLA development (and, hence, a “theory of SLA”) must be built on not only detailed accounts of interlanguage data but also on a wide appeal to factors which govern the psycholinguistic bases of SLA.
An important addition to the volume is a comprehensive guide to both the DOS and Macintosh versions of the VARBRUL statistical program used by variationists.

Second Language Acquisition in a Study Abroad Context brings together for the first time a series of studies which explore the relationship between language learning and the study abroad experience. Utilizing different research methodologies (quantitative, qualitative, descriptive), the focus in this collection is on various aspects of second language learning, including the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence, the acquisition of fluency, the use of communicative strategies and the development of oral and written skills. The studies are cross-linguistic and deal with student populations at the secondary and college levels who spent between three months and one year in study abroad or exchange programs in Japan, Russia, Spain, Mexico, France or Canada.

This volume examines the sociocultural factors that influence language choices and uses in the multilingual country of Luxembourg. Patterns of language use within and across communities are viewed in terms of interrelationships among language policy intent, implementation, and experience. The study considers the ways in which the language and social experiences within low socioeconomic communities differ from school expectations and how these differences affect achievement of both individual and government goals. A history of past language policies and practices sets the background for recent policy formation and current language uses and values. An investigation of the roles of reading, writing and speaking within school settings illustrates policy implementation and individual usage. The ways in which policy is experienced is described in terms of the number and extent of language functions within communities. The nature of language experience is reflected in ethnographic descriptions of the roles language and literacy abilities play in social life. These descriptions are presented in terms of patterns of language use across socioeconomic groups and through composite case studies of three families representing upper, middle and lower class backgrounds. Community and school language behaviors are then compared across socioeconomic groups through an analysis of the degree of congruence between reading, writing, and speaking functions outside of the school and the in-school norms and methods of language instruction. The study further explores the practical and theoretical implications of the relationships among policy intent, implementation, and experience in the context of socioeconomic transitions in modern multilingual nations.

This is the second volume of the SiBil series to present results from the European Science Foundation's project 'Second language acquisition by adult immigrants'. It deals specifically with the acquisition of temporality in five European languages: Dutch, English, French, German and Swedish, providing a detailed account of how adult learners who have little or no exposure to classroom teaching, express temporality at any given stage of the acquisition process, how they proceed from one stage to the next, and what factors determine both their progress and their final levels of proficiency. The guiding hypotheses, methodology, and theoretical framework for analysing temporality from a cross-linguistic perspective are given in Chapters 1 and 2. The detailed longitudinal analyses of Chapters 3-7 form the backbone of the book. Chapter 8 contains the cross-linguistic generalizations, the factors which account for them, and the wider theoretical implications of the study.

In the study of bilingualism, the lexical level of language is of prime importance because, in practical terms, vocabulary acquisition is an essential prerequisite for the development of skill in language use; from a theoretical point of view, the mental lexicon, as a bridge between form and meaning, plays a crucial role in any model of language processing. A central issue in this volume is at which level of the bilingual speaker's lexicon languages share representations and how language-specific representations may be linked.
The contributors favor a dynamic, developmental perspective on bilingualism, which takes account of the change of the mental lexicon over time and pays considerable attention to the acquisition phase. Several papers deal with the level of proficiency and its consequences for bilingual lexical processing, as well as the effects of practice. This discussion raises numerous questions about the notion of (lexical) proficiency and how this can be established by objective standards, an area of study that invites collaboration between researchers working from a theoretical and from a practical background.

This volume presents the results of part of the ESF project 'Second language acquisition by adult immigrants'. The present study deals specifically with structure of utterances in learner varieties. The authors have attempted to find general principles which determine the form of utterances from the very beginning to relatively advanced stages. Chapter 1 and 2 provide the framework for the study and here the guiding hypotheses are sketched on the basis of a pilot analysis. The empirical part of the study is contained in Chapters 3-6, in which data are given for the acquisition of, respectively, English (by Punjabi and Italian learners), German (Italian and Turkish learners), Dutch (Turkish and Moroccon learners) and French (Moroccon and Spanish learners), thus allowing for crosslinguistic comparisons in various ways. For each data-set the learner's linguistic repertoire is established, and then the utterance patterns recurrent in his/her production and the constraints these patterns are subject to. In Chapter 7 the general and theoretical implications are discussed.

The 19th-century European notion of the one people-one language nation as the ideal state has been a very pervasive influence in spite of the fact that most countries in the world today are multilingual, that is they contain ethnic groups in contact and not infrequently in competition. Such thinking has held implications for the setting of language policies, from hanging a wooden clog around the neck of a child heard speaking Occitan in Southern France to the considerable budgeting in Ireland for the promotion of Irish.
In this book, Paulston presents an analytical framework for explaining and predicting the language behaviour of social groups as such behaviour relates to linguistic policies for minority groups. She argues that a number of factors must be considered in the understanding and establishment of language policies for minority groups:
(1) if language planning is to be successful, it must consider the social context of language problems, (2) the linguistic consequences for social groups in contact will vary depending on the focus of social mobilization, i.e. ethnicity or nationalism, and (3) a major problem in the accurate prediction of such linguistic consequences lies in identifying the salient factors which contribute to language maintenance or shift, i.e. answering the question “under what conditions?”.
Part I outlines and discusses the analytical framework, beginning with a general consideration of language problems and language policies and of the social factors which contribute to language maintenance and shift. The author continues to discuss four distinct types of social mobilization, which under certain specified social conditions result in different linguistic consequences: ethnicity, ethnic movements, ethnic nationalism, and geographic nationalism. The argument is that such an understanding is vital to helpful educational policies and successful language planning in general.
Part II contrasts and compares a number of case studies for clarification of their diverse courses of mother tongue maintenance. It particularly seeks to illustrate the type of social mobilization discussed in Part I and to understand the social conditions which influence and alter the effects of the type of social mobilization.

This volume examines the relationship between young children's degrees of bilingualism and features of the verbal input which these children receive from their parents. In particular, it seeks to explore the following question: to what extent are families who follow the 'one parent-one language' principle and whose children become active bilinguals this way, different from families who take the same approach but whose children never develop an active command of the minority language? Case studies of six first-born children growing up with German and English were done during the children's third year of life. The input the children received was examined for parents' consistency of language choice, parents' insistence that the children use the appropriate language, parents' sensitivity towards the children's interactional and attentional needs, and parents' orientation towards the teaching of formal aspects of the linguistic system. The findings support the notion that raising one's children bilingually according to the 'one parent-one language' principle involves great efforts on the side of the minority language-speaking parent. Importantly, they indicate that these efforts must be invested in the child's education turn-by-turn.

This volume focuses on priorities for research in language pedagogy. The aim is to give an up-to-date overview of current thinking about important research issues such as the viability of large scale comparisons, the quantitative/qualitative research controversy, new trends in language testing and evaluation, and the role of different learning environments. In their discussions of these issues researchers from the US and from different countries in Europe show to what extent the priorities differ on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

The papers in this volume describe a wide variety of language contact settings in which one or more languages are in a process of shift. In the first part of the book theoretical perspectives are presented, followed by linguistic, sociological and descriptive studies of languages and countries that have attracted the interest of researchers before, as well as less well known examples. Data are presented from: the Philippines, Korea, Japan, Israel, The Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Sweden, Spain, Denmark, Morocco, Finland, Malaysia, Germany, USA, Ireland, India, Tanzania and Australia.