Der Zweitspracherwerb des deutschen Kasus in der Präpositionalphrase

Author(s):  
Katharina Turgay

AbstractCase is one of the grammatical categories that pose great challenges to children acquiring German, both in first and second language acquisition. The paper examines the special case of the second language acquisition of case within prepositional phrases (PPs). A prototypical German PP consists of a preposition selecting a determiner phrase (DP) whose case is governed by the prepositional head. One problem is that the case assigned by a preposition and its semantics are not related to each other, while in the case of socalled two-way prepositions, the semantics of the PP and the case within the DP are closely connected. This conflict between arbitrariness and semantically driven case assignment could pose an additional obstacle for learners of German. I have conducted an experiment in which I examined how case within PPs is acquired by 56 primary school children whose first language is not German. My study shows that the children have great difficulties regarding the dative and that the accusative is used instead very often. This overgeneralization decreases with an increase in age.

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.


2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 417-417 ◽  
Author(s):  
HOLGER HOPP ◽  
MONIKA S. SCHMID

The open access copyright line contained within this page was not included in the original FirstView article or the print article contained within this issue. We sincerely regret these errors and any problems they may have caused.


2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikolay Slavkov

This article investigates spoken productions of complex questions with long-distance wh-movement in the L2 English of speakers whose first language is (Canadian) French or Bulgarian. Long-distance wh-movement is of interest as it can be argued that it poses difficulty in acquisition due to its syntactic complexity and related high processing load. Adopting the derivational complexity hypothesis, which has so far been applied to long-distance (LD) wh-movement in L1 acquisition and child second language acquisition, I argue that adult L2 learners also show evidence that questions with LD wh-movement are often replaced by alternative utterances with lower derivational complexity. I propose that such utterances, which are sometimes of equivalent length and with similar meaning to the targeted LD wh-structures, are avoidance strategies used by the learners as an intermediate acquisition resource. That is, such strategies are used as an escape-hatch from the derivational complexity of LD wh-movement. Overall, the results of this research indicate that the link between the number and complexity of derivational steps in a given structure is a fruitful area with strong potential in the second language acquisition field.


2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 150-159
Author(s):  
Jan H. Hulstijn

This paper predicts that the study of second language acquisition, as a young discipline of scientific inquiry in its own right, faces a bright future, but only if its scholarly community critically re-examines some notions and assumptions that have too long been taken for granted. First, it is time to reconsider familiar dichotomies, such as second versus foreign language and natural versus instructed language learning. Furthermore, it is worth checking whether and to what extent the puzzling phenomena to be explained by language acquisition theories do really exist (such as uniformity and success and fast acquisition rates in first language acquisition and universal developmental sequences in second language acquisition). The paper furthermore pleas for a multidisciplinary approach to the explanation of the fundamental puzzles of first and second language acquisition and bilingualism, including bridging the divide between psycholinguistic and socio-cultural theories.


1996 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 9-21
Author(s):  
Niclas Abrahamsson

This paper looks at whether Natural Phonology can be directly applied to second language acquisition. First, the original theory, as presented by Stampe and Donegan in the 1970s, is outlined. Secondly, its application to first language acquisition is presented, as this is highly crucial for the following discussion on the naturalness of second language phonology. Thirdly, an attempt is made to establish a preliminary model of the application to second language speech. Findings indicate that Natural Phonology is able to, if not resolve, then at least shed some light on a controversial issue in second language research, namely the distinction between interference and development. With the dichotomy of processes vs. rules offered by Natural Phonology, and hence the interpretation of deviations in second language research as the result of failure of suppression and limitation of processes (instead of as the result of interference from LI phonological rules), the interference/ development distinction collapses. In addition, a principle of closest phonetic value' is postulated in order to explain substitutional variation across learners with differing LI backgrounds. Although highly promising, application of Natural Phonology to second language issues also raises inherent problems in the original theory that need to be resolved. Instead of the notions of innateness and latency of processes proposed by Stampean Natural Phonology, in this paper, suggestions are made concerning the brain's early programming of processes in the form of a model which covers both first and second language acquisition.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 55-64
Author(s):  
Nabaraj Neupane

Second language acquisition (SLA) generates and tests the theories concerning the acquisition of languages other than first language (L1) in different contexts. Even if SLA is a nascent discipline, its history is remarkable and helpful to seek the answers to the questions that researchers are raising in the field of second language or foreign language. Based on this context, this article aims to recount the history of the burgeoning discipline that heavily draws from numerous disciplines like linguistics, psychology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and so on. To achieve the objective, document analysis method has been used. The analysis and interpretation of the available documents exhibit that the traces of SLA were observed in the studies that address the issue of language transfer. Specifically, the diachronic study proves that the development of the discipline has undergone three evolving phases like background, formative, and developmental. The background phase caters for behaviourism, contrastive analysis hypothesis, and the attacks on the fundamental premises of behaviourism. The formative phase deals with Chomsky’s revolutionary steps, error analysis, interlanguane theory, morpheme order studies, and the Krashen’s monitor model that opened up the avenues for further studies of SLA. The developmental phase recounts various studies that have consolidated SLA as a separate discipline.


1993 ◽  
Vol 36 (6) ◽  
pp. 1258-1270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel I. Mayberry

This study determined whether the long-range outcome of first-language acquisition, when the learning begins after early childhood, is similar to that of second-language acquisition. Subjects were 36 deaf adults who had contrasting histories of spoken and sign language acquisition. Twenty-seven subjects were born deaf and began to acquire American Sign Language (ASL) as a first language at ages ranging from infancy to late childhood. Nine other subjects were born with normal hearing, which they lost in late childhood; they subsequently acquired ASL as a second language (because they had acquired spoken English as a first language in early childhood). ASL sentence processing was measured by recall of long and complex sentences and short-term memory for signed digits. Subjects who acquired ASL as a second language after childhood outperformed those who acquired it as a first language at exactly the same age. In addition, the performance of the subjects who acquired ASL as a first language declined in association with increasing age of acquisition. Effects were most apparent for sentence processing skills related to lexical identification, grammatical acceptability, and memory for sentence meaning. No effects were found for skills related to fine-motor production and pattern segmentation.


1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Hawkins ◽  
Richard Towell

AbstractPrior to the late 1960s second language acquisition was thought to be a relatively uninteresting phenomenon; it involved transferring grammatical properties already activated in the first language (L 1) onto second language (L 2) vocabulary. Successful L 2 learners were those who could capitalise on the similarities between the L 1 and the L 2, and eradicate the differences; and successful language teaching involved training learners to overcome the L 1-L 2 differences. Today, perceptions of second language acquisition are more sophisticated and nuanced. Second language acquisition researchers are interested in questions bearing not only on the influence of the L 1, but also on the degree of systematicity in L 2 development, the role that L 1, but also on the degree of systematicity in L 2 development, the role that conscious knowledge plays, the sources of variability in second language speaker performance, the ultimate levels of success achieved by L 2 learners of different ages, and individual differences between learners. The purpose of this article is to present what the authors believe to be some of the key issues which characterise current second language acquisition research, and to consider those issues within the specific context of the acquisition of French as second language.


Author(s):  
María Martínez-Adrián

AbstractResearch on the use of the first language (L1) in interactional strategies by young Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is still in its infancy. Here we compare CLIL and NON-CLIL primary school children in terms of L1 use in interactional strategies. The oral production of 44 age- and proficiency-matched dyads (21 CLIL, 22 NON-CLIL) is analyzed in terms of use of the L1 in appeals, clarification requests and metacomments. The results indicate that NON-CLIL learners produce more instances of L1 use in interactional strategies and that greater differences emerge as grade increases. This is consistent with previous research in CLIL contexts as well as investigations that have compared CLIL and NON-CLIL contexts. A qualitative inspection of the results has also revealed that there are differences between groups in their preference for either the L1 or the target language (TL) in the case of appeals and clarification requests. However, metacomments are always produced in the L1 in both groups, which appears to support previous classroom observation data.


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