Developmental Aspects of Second-Language Acquisition: I. Associational Fluency, Stimulus Provocativeness, and Word-Order Influence

1956 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wallace E. Lambert
1987 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manfred Pienemann

Abstract In this article it is claimed that there is a set of universal speech processing constraints which applies to all types of second language acquisition. These constraints define the range of possible hypotheses about the structure of the L2 which a learner can create at a given stage of development and cannot be overridden by formal instruction or by other alterations in the linguistic input. These claims, however, do not imply that all types of language acquisition are identical or that teaching has no influence whatsoever on the way a second language develops in a formal context. It has been shown elsewhere (cf. Pienemann, 1984, 1985, 1987a) that under certain conditions teaching can influence formal L2 development. These demonstrable positive effects of teaching, however, remain inside the variational margin left open by the processing constraints. The present paper reports on the interlanguage development of one learner of German as a second language, selected from a broader longitudinal study of one year’s duration. It was found that the learner’s word order development was identical to the natural development of German as a second language despite the progression intended in the teaching. A similar result was obtained in the development of verbal morphology. It is also shown that agreement marking is acquired at the same time as specific word order rules.


2003 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 77-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marit Westergaard

This study investigates how child speakers of a verb second (V2) language acquire the supposedly more basic SVO word order of English. Data comes from approximately 100 Norwegian school children aged 7 to 12 in their acquisition of three related syntactic constructions. The focus of the investigation is the extent of language transfer from the L1, related to questions of markedness. It is shown that there is considerable transfer of Norwegian word order, and the children need to ‘unlearn’ the V2 rule acquired for their first language in the process of learning English. In a cue-based approach to second language acquisition, the input cues that are necessary to reorganize the children’s internalized grammar are identified, and the frequency of these cues is argued to be responsible for the order of acquisition of the various constructions.


2008 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 287-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosamond Mitchell ◽  
Laura Domínguez ◽  
María J. Arche ◽  
Florence Myles ◽  
Emma Marsden

The contribution of Spanish to the field of SLA continues to grow (Lafford & Salaberry 2003; Montrul 2004), and the need for good L2 Spanish datasets is becoming increasingly evident. In this paper we introduce a newly created database titled Spanish Learner Language Oral Corpus (SPLLOC), describing the rationale underlying the database design and methodology used for its construction. This project applying CHILDES tools to L2 Spanish follows successful creation of a collection of French L2 oral corpora (Rule et al. 2003), already available at www.flloc.soton.ac.uk. Creating a successful oral corpus is costly and available corpora are often built somewhat opportunistically from available material rather than designed in a balanced way to facilitate SLA research. The SPLLOC database has been designed to fill the existing gap in Spanish L2 resources and also to support a focused research agenda investigating learner development with respect to the verb phrase, clitic pronouns, and word order, from an interface perspective.


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