SCHOOL‐AGE SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS' ACCESS TO SIMPLIFIED LINGUISTIC INPUT1

Abstract

Studies of the speech addressed to young children show that the linguistic input to first language learners is simpler, more correct, and more redundant than speech to adults. Studies of foreigner talk, on the other hand, suggest that the linguistic input to adult second language learners contains ungrammatical utterances, incorrect word order, simplified forms which are not found in the standard language, and repetition of the second language speaker's own mistakes. The questions arise whether such distorted speech input is also addressed to child second language learners, with whom much simpler conversational topics can be discussed, and whether the nature of the speech input to second language learners is related to the speech or ease of their second language acquisition. The speech addressed to English‐speaking children, aged 3 to 18, by their Dutch classmates and teachers was analyzed. This speech was found to be simpler than speech addressed to native speakers of the same age, and was not characterized by mistakes or distortions. Many explicitly tutorial sequences were found in the speech to the second language learners. However, no aspect of the input speech looked at could be directly related to the second language learners' subsequent improvement in Dutch.