Studies on Language Acquisition [SOLA]

This book is the first of its kind to provide an integrative look at World Englishes, (second) language acquisition, and sociolinguistics in a variety of contexts of English around the globe with a focus on the language of children and adolescents. It thus aims to bridge the paradigm gaps that have been identified between these approaches but have rarely been explored in greater detail.

The range of topics includes the areas of first and second language acquisition; sociolinguistic variation and awareness; language use and choice; family language policies; language attitudes and perception; modelling children’s and adolescents’ language in World Englishes; the role of child language acquisition in processes of language change; as well as methodologies of eliciting speech and writing from children and adolescents. The book combines qualitative and quantitative approaches and draws on psycholinguistic, corpus-linguistic, and ethnographic methodologies. What unites the contributions to the volume is that they all address the theoretical implications that a joint approach between World Englishes, sociolinguistics, and language acquisition has, i.e. why it is fruitful and how it can contribute to a deeper understanding of the different research paradigms.

New quantitative methodology and the development of corpus and experimental linguistics tools have recently made researching lexical comprehension and production more accessible. While several tools and data sets are available in English (Coh-metrix, CELEX) and a few other languages, the development of resources and empirical research is still lacking in Spanish.

This volume brings together original empirical research and theoretical perspectives that examine lexical development in Spanish L1, L2 and L3, with a focus on different teaching approaches and textbook coverage of Spanish lexicon in L2 curricula and the use of corpus linguistics in methodological investigations. Some questions addressed include the role of lexical development in mapping grammatical acquisition phases, the potential transfers of L1 to L2 lexical abilities, the effect of explicit vocabulary learning techniques in L2, how affective meaning modulates L2 acquisition, or how a typological understanding of lexical organization can help in teaching more effectively the lexicon of a language, among many others.

The book offers an overview of what is currently being done in the field of Spanish lexical acquisition through a myriad of approaches and topics.

The study of informal involvement with additional languages has recently emerged as a dynamic research field in SLA. With the rapid development and spread of internet-based technologies, contact with foreign languages outside the classroom has become commonplace. While this can take multiple forms, online contents are a major driving force because they present learners with unprecedented opportunities for exposure to and use of target languages regardless of their physical location. Research from diverse geographical, educational and socio-economic contexts bring a rich variety of perspectives to this book. It explores these phenomena via a range of theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches, focusing particularly on individual differences and language development. The volume proposes that teachers in formal learning settings should seek to support and facilitate the development of these identities and practices, and it indicates means they can adopt to best do so.

Researchers have looked into the role of individual differences in second language learning and found that differences between learners in areas such as language aptitude, language learning motivation and exposure to the language influence second language learning. Most of this research concerned adults. Far fewer studies have addressed the role of individual differences in second language learning of young learners.
As second language learning programmes tend to start earlier than before and children are nowadays frequently exposed to a foreign language in social settings such as online games and social media, studying the role of individual differences in young learners can contribute both to SLA-theories and to evidence-based L2 education.
This book discusses recent findings concerning the role of individual differences in language learning in young learners. The chapters in the book concern different topics linked to internal individual differences such as language aptitude, motivation, attitude and external individual differences such as exposure and type of instruction, the relative contribution of internal and external factors to language learning, and the interplay between the two types of individual differences.

In the field of second language (L2) acquisition, the number of studies focusing on L2 pronunciation instruction and perceptual/production training has increased as new classroom methodologies have been proposed and new goals for L2 pronunciation have been set. This book brings together different approaches to L2 pronunciation research in the classroom or in the language laboratory.

13 chapters, written by well-known researchers focusing on a variety of first and target languages, are divided into four parts:

• Pronunciation development and intelligibility: implications for teaching and training studies;
• L2 pronunciation teaching;
• L2 pronunciation training: implications for the classroom; and
• Pronunciation in the laboratory: High Variability Phonetic Training.

Intended for researchers in the fields of second language acquisition, phonetics, phonology, psycholinguistics, speech therapies, speech technology, as well as second language teaching, this book not only summarizes the current research questions on L2 pronunciation teaching and training, but also predicts future scenarios for both researchers and practitioners in the field.

This book investigates selected aspects of the grammatical development of Emirati Arabic, the variety of Gulf Arabic spoken in the United Arab Emirates and closely related to the varieties spoken in the rest of the Gulf States. While the acquisition of Arabic as a second language has been widely studied, first language acquisition of different Arabic dialects has received much less attention. Ntelitheos addresses this disparity by presenting a number of systematic studies on the acquisition of Emirati Arabic grammar based on a two-year longitudinal corpus of six children. He discusses the acquisition of the nominal domain, including definiteness and possession; the acquisition of verbal functional structure and agreement; and the acquisition of word order and negation in the syntactic domain. In addition, he defines several developmental stages for Emirati Arabic, based on established diagnostic tests. The discussion is framed within a general survey of the relevant literature in Arabic acquisition studies and combines new empirical data with rigorous discussion of several long-standing theoretical problems in the broader field of child language development.

Acquisition of the native language proceeds in a stage-wise manner for both typically developing (TD) children and children with developmental language disorder (DLD). As shown in TD children learning Dutch and German, the ability to establish contextual cohesion serves as the driving force to proceed from a simple, lexical system to a more complex, functional system. It is argued that precisely this ability is challenged in children with DLD. The present book offers an account of the functional linguistic features fit to achieve contextual cohesion in language production. It provides a rationale for practitioners to develop linguistically founded tools to be used in speech therapy.

The comparative investigation of the acquisition of gender in Spanish by early and late bilinguals of different language combinations is highly debated and crucial as the phenomenon of gender involves grammatical features that differ in all three languages under investigation. Against this background, both early and late bilinguals face an arduous learning task which differs in complexity. Couched within a generative framework, the empirical study focuses on 257 participants with different levels of proficiency in Spanish ranging from low to advanced, and through a series of tests aims to discover which extra-linguistic and intra-linguistic factors act as triggers for non-native outcomes in adult heritage speakers and L2 learners. The observed morphological variability is argued not to stem from a representational (i.e. syntactic) deficit, but rather from a mapping problem in L2 learners and heritage speakers. Successful attainment in terms of gender is possible but dependent on the interplay between various extralinguistic and linguistic factors.

In the field of Second Language Studies, shared datasets provide a valuable contribution to second language research as many variables are held constant (e.g., participants, tasks, research context) thus allowing for an evaluation of theoretical and/or methodological perspectives that may not otherwise be comparable. This edited volume includes a wide range of studies using a common dataset (the Corpus of Collaborative Oral Tasks). The corpus includes 820 spoken tasks (268,927 words) carried out by dyads of L2 English speakers (primarily Chinese and Arabic learners). Studies included in the book are categorized into three main traditions: learner corpus research, Task-Based Language Teaching, and assessment. Because the corpus contains text and sound files, both lexico-grammatical and phonological analyses are included. Intended for researchers in the field of Second Language Studies with an interest in oral interaction research, this book provides a collection of methodological, pedagogical, and assessment studies using a common dataset.

This book examines how words are stored in the minds of Chinese speakers. It examines the mental lexicons of both native speakers of Chinese/first language (L1) users and second language (L2) learners of Chinese.

Children who grow up as second- or third-generation immigrants typically acquire and speak the minority language at home and the majority language at school. Recurrently, these children have been the subject of controversial debates about their linguistic abilities in relation to their educational success. However, such debates fail to recognise that variation in bilinguals’ language processing is a phenomenon in its own right that results from the dynamic influence of one language on another. This volume provides insight into cross-linguistic influence in Turkish-German and Turkish-French bilingual children and uncovers the nature of variation in L1 and L2 oral motion event descriptions by evaluating the impact of language-specific patterns and language dominance.
The results indicate that next to typological differences between the speakers’ L1 and L2, language dominance has an impact on the type and direction of influence. However, the author argues that most variation can be explained by L1/L2 usage preferences. Bilinguals make frequent use of patterns that exist in both languages, but are unequally preferred by monolingual speakers. This finding underlines the importance of usage-based approaches in SLA.

The Spanish language is spoken by an estimated 477 million people worldwide. This volume focuses on the contact between Spanish and other language varieties, including Catalan, Portuguese and Galician in the Spanish Peninsula. The book explores the characteristics of such language contact situations from structural, developmental, societal and cognitive perspectives.

Counterfactual thinking is a universal cognitive process in which reality is compared to an imagined view of what might have been. This type of reasoning is at the center of daily operations, as decision-making, risk preventability or blame assignment. More generally, non-factual scenarios have been defined as a crucial ingredient of desire and modern love. If the areas covered by this reasoning are so varied, the L2 learner will be led to express 'what might have been' at some point of her acquisitional itinerary. How is this reasoning expressed in French, Spanish and Italian? By the use of what lexical, syntactic and grammatical devices? Will the learner combine these devices as the native French speakers do? What are the L1 features likely to fossilize in the L2 grammar? What are the information principles governing a communicative task based on the production of counterfactual scenarios? These are some of the questions addressed by the present volume.

Although usage-based approaches have been successfully applied to the study of both first and second language acquisition, to monolingual and bilingual development, and to naturalistic and instructed settings, it is not common to consider these different kinds of acquisition in tandem. The present volume takes an integrative approach and shows that usage-based theories provide a much needed unified framework for the study of first, second and foreign language acquisition, in monolingual and bilingual contexts. The contributions target the acquisition of a wide range of linguistic phenomena and critically assess the applicability and explanatory power of the usage-based paradigm. The book also systematically examines a range of cognitive and linguistic factors involved in the process of language development and relates relevant findings to language teaching. Finally, this volume contributes to the assessment and refinement of empirical methods currently employed in usage-based acquisition research. This book is of interest to scholars of language acquisition, language pedagogy, developmental psychology, as well as Cognitive Linguistics and Construction Grammar.

This book deals with the development of modality from a crosslinguistic perspective and is closely related to two earlier volumes on the development of verb and nominal inflection in first language acquisition (SOLA 21 and 30) both methodologically and theoretically. Each of the fourteen contributions studies the early development of the form and function of expressions of deontic and dynamic agent-oriented modality or epistemic and evidential propositional modality in one of fourteen languages belonging to different morphological types and language families (seven Indo-European and seven non-Indo-European).

The analyses are mainly based on longitudinal observations of children in their 2nd and 3rd years of life in conversational interaction with their caregivers, mostly the mothers. Main issues addressed are the development of directives and modulations of information in terms of certainty and evidentiality, also taking into account children’s developing social-pragmatic and cognitive skills. One of the main findings is that agent-oriented and propositional modality may develop in parallel depending on the typological characteristics of the language acquired. The decisive factor is whether notions of propositional modality are grammaticized and obligatorily expressed in the language. The findings are interpreted within non-nativist theoretical frameworks (Usage-based theories, Natural Morphology).

This book combines studies on referential as well as relational coherence and includes approaches to written and to spoken language, to production and to comprehension, to language specific and to cross-linguistic issues, to monolingual, bilingual and L2-acquisition. The theoretical issues and empirical findings discussed are of importance not only for theoretical linguistics, but also have a broad potential of practical implication.

This volume presents a collection of new articles that investigate the acquisition of Romance languages across different acquisition contexts as well as refine and propose new theoretical constructs such as complexity of linguistic features as a relevant factor forming children’s, adults’, and bilinguals’ acquisition of syntactical, morphological, and phonological structures.

While the literature on second language acquisition and use is overwhelmingly rich with respect to initial and intermediate stages of development, present knowledge of levels of ultimate attainment that are equal or close to that if native speakers has so far not been presented in a coherent manner. This is what the present volume aims to achieve. In addition to chapters that summarize what is currently known about the grammatical, lexical, and discourse features that continue to exhibit instability at the most advanced levels of second language development, the volume presents overviews of the incipient research on two unique learner populations, polyglots and employees in international call centres. Polyglots, defined as language users who are proficient in six or more second languages, may be considered second language learners par excellence. Call centre employees in economically less developed parts of the world are intriguing in how they cope with the high language proficiency requirements of their job. In conclusion, this book is relevant for all readers - both professionals and students - interested in the development of second language theory. For language teachers, the book provides insights that are profitable in classrooms for advanced learners.

There is a long overdue need to address the sharp philosophical and methodological divide between formal/generative and functional/discourse perspectives in contemporary theoretical linguistics and L2 acquisition. Language structure in general, and the use of subjects in particular, is dependent upon multiple syntactic, lexico-semantic, and discourse-pragmatic factors. Therefore, the study of L2 acquisition must be equally multi-faceted.

This volume examines data from over twenty years of research in the L2 acquisition of Spanish subjects from several theoretical perspectives, including generative approaches, processing theory, discourse-pragmatics and sociolinguistic-variationist models. By so doing, the author seeks to fulfill two principal objectives: the first is to determine the many linguistic and extra-linguistic properties of Spanish subjects that constrain their acquisition and use; and the second is to establish common ground among researchers from varied theoretical persuasions in acquisition studies. The author argues throughout the volume that central to native speaker use and L2 acquisition are universal properties ranging from highly specific syntactic principles to more general characteristics of human cognition and a range of these properties is responsible for language acquisition. An examination of the diverse body of research that considers a wider scope of universal properties of language can thus bring us closer to a unified account of the L2 acquisition of Spanish subject expression.

Dummy auxiliaries are seemingly superfluous words that appear in learner varieties across languages. This volume is an up-to-date overview of research on dummy auxiliaries with contributions covering English, Dutch, German, French, Cypriot-Greek, first and second language acquisition, and specific language impairment as well as dialectal variation.

A growing number of studies have begun to examine the influence of language-specific factors on language acquisition. During language acquisition, German children from six years on use structures that are similar to those of adults in their language group and also encode all semantic components from an early age. In striking contrast, French children up to ten years have difficulties producing some of the complex structures that are necessary for the simultaneous expression of several semantic components. Nonetheless, in addition to these striking cross-linguistic differences, the results of this study also clearly show similar developmental progressions in other respects, suggesting the impact of general developmental determinants.

This is the first comprehensive account of prolonged hearing loss and its impact on a language that was once spoken fluently. Although it is currently assumed that hearing loss results in speech deterioration, it is shown that language loss occurs when speakers remain deaf for a long time. The reader is introduced to a significant deaf population — postlingually deafened Yoruba speakers who have been deaf for more than twenty years and who have no access to hearing aids or speech therapy. After becoming deaf, they continue to speak Yoruba from memory and “hear” visually through lip reading. These speakers exhibit phonological, lexical and syntactic losses which mirror acquisition patterns attested in the speech of Yoruba children. Based on these similarities, it is argued that a direct link exists between language loss and first language acquisition. It is further argued that prolonged deafness results in language reversal. Finally, the book presents the first description of the sign language and gestures used by deafened speakers to augment their spoken language. These findings will be of value to linguists, speech, language and hearing therapists, anthropologists, Africanists, deaf studies researchers, and non-specialists who are interested in hearing health and wellness.

This innovative and original volume brings together studies that apply cognitive and functional linguistics to the study of the L2 acquisition of Japanese. With each article grounded on the usage-based model and/or conceptual notions such as foregrounding and subjectivity, the volume sheds light on how cognitive and functional linguistics can help us understand aspects of Japanese acquisition that have been neglected by traditionalists.

This book explores an understudied area of language development in autism – namely, how children with autism learn the meaning of verbs. The key feature is a profile of verb acquisition in autism derived from qualitative analysis of the conversational language of ten children with autism. Douglas examines whether this profile is typical or atypical compared with verb learning in neurotypical children. Verb use is central to linguistic development, and the ability of children with autism to develop and use verb categories is of interest, because verbs also encode information about the number and type of participants and the temporal location of the activity/event. Moreover, the acquisition of verb meanings is often dependent on other cognitive skills, such as the recognition that human beings have beliefs and desires which motivate their actions. All these are areas which are widely considered problematic for children with autism and continue to generate much discussion among researchers and clinicians. This investigation is among the first studies of its type, offering new insights into the process of language acquisition in autism.

The Acquisition of German: Introducing Organic Grammar brings together work on the acquisition of German from over four decades of child L1 and immigrant L2 learner studies. The book’s major feature is new longitudinal data from three secondary school students who began an exchange year in Germany with no German knowledge and attained fluency. Their naturalistic acquisition process — with a succession of stages described for the first time in L2 acquisition — is highly similar to that of younger learners. This has important implications for German teaching and for the theory of Universal Grammar and acquisition. Organic Grammar, a variant of generative syntax, is offered as a practical alternative to Chomsky’s Minimalism. The analysis focuses on extensive monthly samples of the three students’ German development in an input-rich environment. Similar to previous studies, the teenagers build syntactic structure from the bottom up. Two acquired correct word order by the end of the year, the third, who had greater conscious awareness of German grammar, had a divergent route of development, suggesting that language awareness can alter a natural developmental path. The results are addressed in light of recent debates in child-adult differences.

The workshop Production-Comprehension Asymmetries in Child Language held in Osnabrück in 2009 is the starting point for this book. The workshop developed from the observation that children's production skills appear to precede their comprehension skills in a number of phenomena, e.g. pronouns or negation. The volume provides cross-linguistic evidence for such asymmetric development and investigates grammatical and methodical explanations of the observed asymmetries.

This book is the first publication on record that systematically and comprehensively addresses the acquisition and development of Cantonese in early childhood. It draws upon evidence from up-to-date reviews of associated literature, on the outcomes of numerous research studies conducted by the authors and on the outcomes of an in-depth study of the largest corpus of early childhood Cantonese. To supplement and illuminate published trends in the literature, carefully gathered reliable and valid empirical data are critically scrutinized. The evidence is used to clarify and examine theoretical assumptions and to outline putative developmental trends in early childhood Cantonese pragmatics.

Although Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is a popular teaching method, research on CLIL has nearly exclusively focused on aspects of language learning. Besides that, we are still lacking any cognitively well-grounded theory about the special features of contexts in which the focus is on content learning, but in which a foreign language is used as the medium of communicating information.
This book re-examines the basis for CLIL from a cognitive perspective and investigates how the use of a foreign language as a working language influences the processing of content. It summarizes findings from cognitive psychology on thinking, problem solving and conceptual processing, and integrates them with models of language-specific mental activities such as speech processing and text composition. This provides a theoretically well-grounded basis for the understanding of the special features of CLIL, and promotes a Cognitive Linguistic perspective on CLIL pedagogy.
The theoretical considerations form the basis for an empirical study that offers the first insights into what CLIL learners actually do when they solve content-focused tasks while using an L2. Through spontaneous verbalization of thought, detailed verbal protocols were elicited and analysed into language and content focused cognitive processes. The analysis shows that both language and conceptual thought interact closely and that a focus on language in general has positive effects on the processing of semantic content; the use of an L2 as working language can enhance this effect. Additionally, the study offers a thorough reflection and new perspectives on verbal protocols as research tools, in particular in L2 contexts.

This edited volume documents the state of the art in research into how the age factor interacts with other factors in a variety of educational contexts. The book comprises 17 chapters examining early language learning and teaching in a range of countries in Europe, Asia and North America. Authors discuss main themes in research methodology, curricular and assessment issues, short- and long-term outcomes, the role of individual differences, innovation in teacher education, classroom processes, as well as the impact of the target language.

The first two chapters (Nikolov; Edelenbos and Kubanek) overview the main trends in research. Four papers (Curtain;Ofra Inbar-Lourie and Elana Shohamy; Jalkannen; Haenni Hoti, Heinzmann, and Müller) focus on the assessment of young learners; two authors examine how age impacts on language learning over time (Muñoz; Kasai). Individual differences (motivation, anxiety, aptitude, and socio-economic status) are explored byMihaljevi? Djigunovi?, Mattheoudakis and Alexiou, and Kiss. Innovation is the common theme in chapters written by Wang, Moon, and Peng and Zhang. The last three papers analyze the status of languages (Harris, Enever, Carmel).

The book is a must have for teacher educators of pre- and in-service teachers of modern languages to young learners, MA and PhD students in TEFL/TESOL and other languages, researchers and policy makers.

Research on spontaneous language acquisition both in children learning their mother tongue and in adults learning a second language has shown that language development proceeds in a stagewise manner. Learner utterances are accounted for in terms of so-called 'learner languages'. Learner languages of both children and adults are language systems that are initially rather simple. The present monograph shows how these learner languages develop both in child L1 and in adult L2 Dutch. At the initial stage of both L1 and L2 Dutch, learner systems are lexical systems. This means that utterance structure is determined by the lexical projection of a predicate-argument structure, while the functional properties of the target language are absent. At some point in acquisition, this lexical-semantic system develops into a target-like system. With this target-like system, learners have reached a stage at which their language system has the morpho-syntactic features to express the functional properties of finiteness and topicality. Evidence of this is word order variation and the use of linguistic elements such as auxiliaries, tense, and agreement markers and determiners. Looking at this process of language acquisition from a functional point of view, the author focuses on questions such as the following. What is the driving force behind the process that causes learners to give up a simple lexical-semantic system in favour of a functional-pragmatic one? What is the added value of linguistic features such as the morpho-syntactic properties of inflection, word order variation, and definiteness?

Research in the field of Chinese as a second/foreign language (L2) acquisition, at present, does not match the increasing demand to learn Chinese as an L2, given that Chinese is the fastest growing foreign language in countries such as Japan, South Korea, the United States, Canada, UK and Australia.

Particularly, research in Chinese L2 word order acquisition requires more attention because word order plays a more complex role in Chinese than in English due to the fact that Chinese relies heavily on word order for information structuring. Experience with Chinese L2 learning and teaching shows that Chinese word order errors are a significant problem with adult English-speaking learners. However, Chinese L2 researchers and teachers are left with no means to adequately describe and explain these errors for instruction purposes.

This book is specifically written to provide such a means for them to understand Chinese word order, to describe and explain Chinese word order errors and also to help treat such errors in L2 classrooms. The centrality of word order in Chinese grammar and the emerging popularity of learning Chinese L2 make this book an important resource for both the learner and the teacher.

Language acquisition is a developmental process. Research on spontaneous processes of both children learning their mother tongue and adults learning a second language has shown that particular stages of acquisition can be discriminated. Initially, learner utterances can be accounted for in terms of a language system that is relatively simple. In studies on second language acquisition this learner system is called the Basic Variety (Klein and Perdue 1997). Utterance structure of the Basic Variety is determined by a grammar which consists of lexical structures that are constrained, for example, by semantic principles such as "The NP-referent with highest control comes first" and a pragmatic principle such as "Focus expression last". At some point in acquisition this lexical-semantic system is given up in favour of a target-like system with morpho-syntactic features to express the functional properties of finiteness, topicality, the determiner system, etc. Insights into how this process evolves may also provide an answer to the question of why it takes place. Within this functional perspective on language acquisition research focuses on questions such as the following.
1. What is the driving force behind the process that causes learners to give up a simple lexical-semantic system in favour of a morpho-syntactic functional category system?
2. What is the added value of morpho-syntactic properties of inflection, word-order variation, definiteness and agreement?
3. Why is it that in cases of specific language impairment it is mainly morpho-syntactic properties of the target language that are affected?

This volume tracks the impact Processing Instruction has made since its conception. The authors explain Processing Instruction, both its main theoretical underpinnings as well as the guidelines for developing structured input practices. They review the empirical research conducted to date, so that readers have an overview of new research carried out on the effects of Processing Instruction. The work concludes with reflections on the generalizability and limits of the research on Processing Instruction and offers future directions for Processing Instruction research.

This volume brings together chapters written by specialists in North America, Europe and Brazil. It includes original research about the acquisition (L1, bilingualism) and acquisition/ learning (L2 or L3) of dialects of Brazilian and European Portuguese. In an effort to maximize volume cohesion, the emphasis has been on contributions that present studies exploring both empirical/experimental and theoretical aspects of the acquisition of syntax, and its interfaces with morphology, with semantics/pragmatics, and with language change.

Within the generative paradigm alone there are various volumes on the acquisition of other languages, but there are no volumes currently in print focusing on the acquisition of Portuguese. We believe that it is time for such a volume, considering among other factors that Portuguese is the second most widely spoken Romance language (second only to Spanish), and the seventh most widely spoken language in the world.

In addition, the significant changes that have taken place between Brazilian and European Portuguese especially since the 19th century make the inquiry into the acquisition of the different dialects a source for very productive insights about the connections between linguistic theory, language acquisition and language change. Finally, having a collection of high quality articles in one place pays homage to the importance for linguistic research of investigations into the acquisition of the Portuguese language.

This book reviews recent research on the second language acquisition of meaning with a view of establishing whether there is a critical period for the acquisition of compositional semantics. A modular approach to language architecture is assumed. The book addresses the Critical Period Hypothesis by examining the positive side of language development: it demonstrates which modules of the grammar are easy to acquire and are not subject to age effects. The Bottleneck Hypothesis is proposed, which argues that inflectional morphology and its features present the most formidable challenge, while syntax and phrasal semantics pose less difficulty to learners. Findings from the neurofunctional imaging (PET, fMRI) and electrophysiology (ERPs) of L2 comprehension are reviewed and critically examined. Since it is argued that experimental tasks in those studies are mostly in need of linguistic refinement, evidence from behavioral studies of L2 acquisition of semantics are brought to bear on comprehension modeling. Learning situations are divided into two types: those presenting learners with complex syntax, but simple semantics; and those offering complex semantic mismatches in simple syntactic contexts. The numerous studies of both types reviewed in the book indicate that there is no barrier to ultimate success in the acquisition of phrasal semantics.

This book includes six studies on the acquisition of single Mesoamerican indigenous languages, (Huichol, Zapotec, and the Mayan languages Ch'ol, Tzeltal, K'iche', and Yukatek); and a crosslinguistic study of five Mayan languages (K'anjob'al, K'iche', Tzeltal, Tzotzil, and Yukatek). Three topics are theoretically and methodologically discussed and empirically demonstrated: with respect to ergativity, the ergative-absolutive cross-referencing pattern on the morphological level, noun-verb distinction and the acquisition of body-part locatives in the early lexicon, and the role of semantic properties and cultural context in language acquisition and socialization. This book makes important claims regarding the methodology of cross-linguistic studies as well as the results of these studies and the comparative method used in the book (structural and discursive factors in language acquisition, cross-linguistic relationships and variation).

The book addresses a controversial current topic in language acquisition studies: the impact of frequency on linguistic structure in child language. A major strength of the book is that the role of input frequency in the acquisition process is evaluated in a large variety of languages, topics and the two major theoretical frameworks: UG-based and usage-based accounts. While most papers report a clear frequency effect, different factors that may be interacting with pure statistical effects are critically assessed. An introductory statement is made by Thomas Roeper who calls for caution as he identifies frequency as a non-coherent concept and argues for a precise definition of what can and cannot be explained by statistical effects.

The present volume is a collection of papers on Contrastive Pragmatics, involving research on interlanguage and cross-cultural perspectives with a focus on second language acquisition contexts. The subdiscipline of pragmatics is seen from a multilingual and multicultural perspective thus contributing to an emerging field of study, i.e. intercultural pragmatics which can be made fruitful to second language teaching/learning and contrastive analysis. The book is an important contribution to general linguistics, pragmatics, cross-cultural communication, second language acquisition, as well as minority issues in multilingual settings.

This book deals with the emergence of nominal morphology from a cross-linguistic perspective and is closely related to Development of Verb Inflection in First Language Acquisition (ed. by D. Bittner, W. U. Dressler, M. Kilani-Schoch) both methodologically and theoretically. Each of the fourteen contributions studies the early development of the fundamental inflectionally expressed categories of the noun (number, case, gender) in one of the languages belonging to different morphological types (isolating, fusional-inflecting, agglutinating, root inflecting) and families (Germanic, Romance, Slavic/Baltic, Greek, Finnic, Turc, Semitic, Indian American). The analyses are based on parallel longitudinal observations of children in their second and early third year of life as well as their input. The focus lies on the transition from a pre-morphological to a proto-morphological stage in which grammatical oppositions and so-called "mini-paradigms" begin to develop. The point at which children start to discover the morphological structure of their language and the speed with which they develop inflectional distinctions of lexical items has been found to be dependent on the morphological richness of the input language on the paradigmatic as well as the syntagmatic axis of linguistic structure. The findings are interpreted within non-nativist theoretical frameworks (Natural Morphology, Usage-based theories).

Current Trends in the Development and Teaching of the four Language Skills builds connections from theory in the four language skills to instructional practices. It comprises twenty-one chapters that are grouped in five sections. The first section includes an introductory chapter which presents a communicative competence framework developed by the editors in order to highlight the key role the four skills play in language learning and teaching. The next four sections each represent a language skill: Section II is devoted to listening, Section III to speaking, Section IV to reading and Section V to writing. In order to provide an extensive treatment of each of the four skills, each section starts with a theoretical chapter which briefly illustrates advances in the understanding of how each skill is likely to be learned and taught, followed by four didactically oriented chapters authored by leading international specialists. These pedagogical chapters deal specifically with four key topics: 1) areas of research that influence the teaching of a particular skill; 2) an overview of strategies or techniques necessary for developing a particular skill; 3) an approach to the academic orientation of a particular skill, and 4) unique aspects of teaching each skill. Moreover, all chapters incorporate two common sections: pre-reading questions at the beginning of the chapter in order to stimulate readers' interest in its content, and a section entitled suggested activities at the end of the chapter in order to allow readers put the ideas and concepts presented into practice. The accessible style and practical focus of the volume make it an ideal tool for teachers, teacher trainers, and teacher trainees who are involved in teaching the four language skills in a second or foreign language context.

This volume brings together ten contributions to the study of untutored (mainly) second but also first language acquisition. All chapters have been written from a functionalist perspective and take as the main theoretical framework a model of spontaneous second language acquisition centered on the "basic variety" as proposed by Klein and Perdue. The chapters in the volume are grouped around two research themes. The first theme concerns the acquisition of scope phenomena (negation, scope particles), the second one deals with referential movement (reference to person, time and space). Both parts provide insights in the structure of learner varieties at various stages of development, and are followed by a discussion chapter.

Scope phenomena, such as negation and frequency adverbials present an important learning problem, as learners have to reconcile the logical structure of their utterances with the syntactic specifics of the language being learned. Their acquisition has been relatively neglected in studies up to date, however, and we even lack detailed knowledge about the interpretation of scope particles in the target languages. The chapters in this part of the volume set out to provide more knowledge about scope phenomena in general; more detailed descriptions of the particles in the languages under consideration; and a more general understanding of how scope is acquired. Strong findings resulting from the "ESF" project suggested universal trends in how untutored learners deal with acquisition in the very early stages (the basic variety). Chapters in this second part of the volume on referential movement look at acquisition at more advanced stages, including the production of near native speakers. Learners who progress beyond the basic variety increasingly grammaticalise their productions. This later development is supposedly more variable, as more specific aspects of the target languages are now being acquired. Chapters in this part allow to shed more light on the question regarding universal and language-specific influences on language acquisition.

The book is about the numeral classifier system and the acquisition of Japanese classifiers by Japanese children. It consists of two parts. First, it provides a general typological characterization of numeral classifier phrases and discusses problems in determining what constitutes the nature of classifiers. It also discusses the semantic properties of numeral classifiers based on an analysis of four languages from four different language families. Second, it examines the acquisitions of Japanese numeral classifiers by Japanese preschool children, ages 3 to 6, with a primary emphasis on the development of comprehension. The importance of the study is that it reveals that young children have a much greater sensitivity to the conceptual underpinnings of the numeral classifier system than was previously considered to be the case. The research results also provide a converging source of evidence that young children often come to initially grasp the structure of the world in ways that are better understood in cognitive than perceptual terms. The implications will contribute to not only the area of language acquisition but also categorization and conceptual development.

The study endeavors a detailed and systematic classification of linguistic simultaneity expressions. Further, it aims at a well described survey of how simultaneity is expressed by native speakers in their own language. On the basis of real production data the book answers the questions of how native speakers express temporal simultaneity in general, and how learners at different levels of proficiency deal with this situation under experimental test conditions. Furthermore, the results of this study shed new light on our understanding of aspect in general, and on its acquisition by adult learners.

Methods in current instructed second language acquisition research range from laboratory experiments to ethnography using non-obtrusive participant observation, from cross-sectional designs to longitudinal case studies. Many different types of data serve as the basis for analysis, including reaction times measurements, global test scores, paper and pencil measures, introspective comments, grammaticality judgements, as well as textual data (elicited or naturalistic, oral or written, relating to comprehension or production). Some studies rely on extensive quantification of data, while others may favour a more qualitative and hermeneutic analytic approach.
Many of these issues and methods are exemplified by the contributions to this volume. Data-based studies included here deal with the acquisition of specific linguistic phenomena (e.g. verb and noun morphology, lexicon, clause structures) in a range of target languages (e.g. English, French, German, Russian) from a variety of settings involving different instructional approaches (e.g. traditional foreign language classes, immersion classes, intensive ESL classes, content and language integrated language classes). Collectively, the chapters in this book illustrate the productivity and diversity of current research on instructed second language acquisition. As such they serve as a valuable resource for researchers in SLA, psycholinguistics, linguistics, and language education.

This book presents a study of the development of time reference in young children acquiring Inuktitut as a first language. The first such study of an Eskimo-Aleut language, its account of children's development of time reference in a system that is fundamentally different from those found in languages previously studied makes a unique contribution to the literature on the acquisition of tense and aspect. Drawing on longitudinal spontaneous speech data from eight Inuit children between 2 and 3-and-a-half years old, this study analyzes the temporal structures, their meanings and context of use in children's communicative interactions with siblings, peers and caretakers during the early stages of language development. The comprehensive study of previously unexplored temporal phenomena and its unprecedented findings makes this book an important resource for researchers, teachers and students of child language development, especially the development of time reference. In addition, the documentation of the Inuktitut temporal system, especially as used in conversational speech, will be of interest to researchers of time reference.

"Auch" and "noch" in Child and Adult German is an empirical study of the early acquisition of "auch" (also) and "noch" (also/still) in German, and the adult use of these additive particles in spoken language. It centres around the question of how children acquire these particles, but it also investigates the way in which adults use these particles in order to determine what children actually have to learn and what the input they get is like. Previous studies on focus particles in adult German mainly focused on the semantic and syntactic properties of primarily constructed examples. Based on several corpora of spoken German, this is the first comprehensive study of natural language data that systematically analyses the intonation of focus particle utterances as well as their semantic, syntactic and information structural properties. The study of the child data, an extensive longitudinal corpus of one German child, was carried out against the background of the adult data. It offers a thorough characterisation of the acquisition of the two additive particles that also takes into account results from previous studies on the acquisition of focus particles, mainly on their comprehension. In addition to studying the acquisition of these particles, the author also introduces an analysis of focus particles that emphasises the differences between stressed and unstressed particles, which makes this book not only interesting to researchers in language acquisition and psycholinguistics, but also to those interested in phonology/prosody, semantics, syntax and information structure.

Insa Gülzow analyzes the acquisition of intensifiers by children acquiring German or English as their first language. Based on a comparative analysis of intensifiers and related expressions in the two languages, she examines the longitudinal production data of six German-speaking and six English-speaking children with regard to when and in which contexts the intensifiers German selbst/selber and English x-self (myself, yourself, himself, etc.) appear. As intensifiers evoke alternatives to the referent of their focus and relate a central referent to more peripheral alternative referents, they are an important linguistic means to structure the participants of a child's early discourse. By integrating intensifiers into their utterances, children can identify themselves as central. The notion of being included or excluded in a certain state of affairs is relevant for children when interacting with their parents and/or other children. In the course of development, children acquire a number of both linguistic and non-linguistic skills that characterize them as increasingly independent and competent agents. In this process, intensifiers are an important linguistic device with which children can negotiate and comment on their participation in a given event. The three parts of the volume consist first, of a detailed analysis of the intensifiers selbst/selber and x-self and related expressions such as allein and by x-self in the two languages. Special attention is given to the fact that in English, intensifiers and reflexive pronouns are identical expressions while in German they are distinct. Second, previous results of comprehension studies are carefully reviewed in order to relate them to the findings in longitudinal production data. Third, a detailed analysis of the children's early use of intensifiers and related expressions is presented.

The volume deals with the emergence of verb morphology in children during their second and early third year of life from a cross-linguistic perspective. It covers 15 contributions - each analyzing one single language - based on parallel longitudinal investigations of children with parallel methodology and macrostructure in representation. The main question addressed is: How do children detect morphology and construct first subsystems of verbal inflection? The focus lies on the transition from a premorphological phase to a protomorphological phase. The main proposal consists in the concept of miniparadigms and of their relation to morpho-syntactic developments in early first language acquisition.

This book is a collection of eight articles by leading scholars investigating of the acquisition of English by native speakers of Japanese. It deals with a wide range of topics from the acquisiton of VP structures to functional categories and presents new empirical data. The studies all contribute to our understanding of these topics, and they are of current interest to researchers working on Second Language Acquisition.

This book focuses on a particular type of formulaic expressions called Situation-Bound Utterances (SBUs). Since the meaning of these pragmatic units is shaped by the interplay of linguistic and extralinguistic factors they can be best accounted for in a theoretical framework which represents a knowledge-for-use conception. A unique feature of the book is that it examines the development and use of a particular type of formulae from new perspectives. The comparison of a monolingual and multilingual approach, and the application of the graded salience hypothesis to SBUs within a cognitive-pragmatic theoretical framework reveal that issues such as the role of context in shaping situational meaning, and the existence of common or similar cognitive mechanisms and knowledge structures responsible for cognitive functions and speech behavior in different languages need revision. As a consequence, the book seeks answer to two main questions: 1) origin and extent of context-sensitiveness, and 2) the development of the particular situational functions of SBUs.

On the basis of recent research it is argued that context affects comprehension only after highly salient information has been accessed. Search for the appropriate meaning stops if the information accessed initially is compatible with the context, and it continues, if it is not. This approach puts the issue of context-sensitiveness of SBUs into an entirely different perspective. It is also discussed that why exactly these utterances started to be used to express those pragmatic functions and not others. SBUs demonstrate better than any other linguistic unit that there is a strong cognitive-linguistic interdependency. The development of certain SBUs can be accounted for through cognitive mechanisms, and vice versa: learning an SBU for a culturally important category can linguistically reinforce the learning of the category itself.

The book uses a cross-linguistic perspective and illustrative examples from several languages which makes its arguments and claims convincing.

This collection of twelve papers demonstrates that the concepts developed within the Cognitive Linguistics movement afford an insightful perspective on several important areas of second language acquisition and pedagogy.

In the first part of the book, three papers show how three Cognitive Linguistics constructs provide a useful theoretical frame within which second language acquisition data can be analyzed. First, Talmy's typology of motion events is argued to constitute the base relative to which acquisition discrepancies in motion events are most valuably investigated. Secondly, the notion of "construction" is invoked in order to account for systematic differences between the native and non-native speakers' use of the English verb get. Finally, frequency and similarity effects are shown to play a crucial part in the learning of prepositions in a second language.

The second part of the book shows that the key concepts commonly invoked in Cognitive Linguistics analyses allow language teachers to insightfully structure the presentation of problematic material in the foreign language classroom. These concepts include among others polysemy, the figure/ground gestalt, the usage-based conception of grammar, the radial organization of categories, metaphors, and cultural scripts. The Cognitive Linguistics paradigm has already shown its viability to analyze a wide array of linguistic phenomena.

This book establishes its relevance in the areas of second language acquisition and language pedagogy. Its intended public is composed of Cognitive Linguists, Second Language Acquisition specialists, as well as foreign language pedagogy researchers, instructors, and students.

Causative change-of-state verbs like 'to open', 'to fill', and 'to wake' are central to both recent theories of grammatical development and theories of lexical structure. This book focuses on how German-speaking children learn the meaning of change-of-state verbs. It offers a thorough characterization of the acquisition of German, embedded in a crosslinguistic perspective. The author provides a comprehensive review of the acquisition literature on that topic and introduces a new account as to how the meaning of these verbs can be learned. The empirical backbone of the investigation are a set of carefully designed experimental studies.

The book concerns theoretical, interdisciplinary and methodological issues in L2 acquisition research. It gives an accurate and up-to-date overview of high quality work currently in progress in research methodology, processing, principles and parameters theory, phonology, the bilingual lexicon, input and instruction. The volume will have the purpose of a handbook for teachers, students and researchers in the area of second language acquisition. The aim is to provide the reader with an acquisition perspective on processes of second and foreign language learning.

This book investigates the notion of Speech Act from a cross-cultural perspective. The starting point for this book is the assumption that speech acts are realized from culture to culture in different ways and that these differences may result in communication difficulties that range from the humorous to the serious. Importantly, a recurring theme in this volume has to do with the need to verify the form, the function and the constraining variables of speech acts as a prerequisite for dealing with them in the classroom.

The book deals with three major areas of Speech Act research: 1) Methodological Issues, 2) Speech Acts in a second language, and 3) Applications. In the first section authors discuss general issues of methodology and present data in an effort to detail the efficacy of different methodologies. Research clearly shows the effect of methodology on the results. This section is followed by a discussion of specific speech acts, including speech acts and strategy use that have as their goal the creation and maintenace of solidarity (i.e. greetings, compliments, apologies) and speech acts that involve face-threatening acts (i.e.complaints, favor-asking, suggestions). In the final section, authors consider applications of speech act research within the context of advertising and business relationships.