Acquisition Of German Research Articles

German acquisitions in Poland: an empirical study on integration management and integration success

This study investigates the effects of integration change on the integration success of German acquisitions in Poland. It is argued that the degree of integration change has a positive impact on two success measures, namely, economic growth and efficient co-operation, in the acquisition target. It is further argued that process transparency, participation and positive reinforcement are moderators in this relationship between degree of integration change and integration success. Hypotheses are tested on 521 Polish employees from twenty-nine German acquisitions made in Poland between 1991 and 1999. The results show that there was a positive relationship between degree of integration change and integration success as expected and that only process transparency emerged as a significant moderator of this relationship. Consequences for post-acquisition management after German acquisitions in Poland and limitations of the study are discussed.

Intervocalic consonants in the acquisition of German: onsets, codas or something else?

This study examines the behaviour of five phonemes /f, P, ts, k, l/ in word-initial, word-final, and intervocalic positions in the productions of five German-speaking children (age 1;3 to 3;3 years) in order to determine the patterning of those intervocalic consonants - do they behave more like onsets or codas? The study also contrasts the behaviour of intervocalic consonants after short versus long vowels in view of the stance taken in the theoretical literature that intervocalic consonants after short vowels are ambisyllabic but not after long vowels. Findings show that out of 25 conditions (5 phonemes 2 5 children), nine yield support for the patterning of intervocalic consonants as codas, two as onsets, and five as unique (neither coda nor onset). Three conditions yield support for the dual patterning of intervocalic consonants. In all other conditions, there was insufficient information to support their patterning with codas or with onsets. Results provide minimal support for different patterns of intervocalic consonants after short and long vowels; however, the lengthening and insertion of consonants after short vowels suggest that children are aware of the different phonological roles of intervocalic consonants after short and long vowels.

Language Acquisition in Young German- Speaking Children with Cochlear Implants: Individual Differences and Implications for Conceptions of a ‘Sensitive Phase’

The acquisition of language was studied longitudinally in a sample of 22 German-speaking children with cochlear implants (mean implantation age 29 months) and a control group of 22 normally hearing children. Spontaneous speech samples were collected over 27–36 months, starting at the the one-word stage. Results indicate that grammatical progress as measured by mean length of utterance was slower for cochlear-implanted children. However, there were substantial individual differences in the cochlear-implanted group. While 10 cochlear-implanted children progressed at pace with normally hearing children, 12 cochlear-implanted children remained well behind. Cochlear-implanted children who showed fast progress at an early stage continued to make fast progress as time went on, and those who showed slow progress early on continued to progress slowly. Pre-operative hearing was a better predictor of subsequent linguistic growth than age at implantation. Increases in vocabulary were associated with grammatical progress in both groups.

Generation of and retraction from cross-linguistically motivated structures in bilingual first language acquisition

The focus of this paper is on unusual developmental structures during the simultaneous acquisition of German and English in early childhood, which were evident parallel to a majority of target structures. The aim is to explain the cognitive motivation for unusual acquisition structures as well as the eventual retraction from them. I will show that they support the contentions of the Competition Model that language acquisition proceeds through orientation to surface structures and that cue competition across languages changes the weighting of cues within the language. The retreat from non-target structures was made possible through the children's attention to contrasts between the languages and the need to resolve structural incompatibilities within the language.

Foreign Direct Investment in the UK 1985–1994: The Impact on Domestic Management Practice

Foreign direct investment (FDI) into the UK has grown considerably in recent years. US, French, German and Japanese companies have generally accounted for the largest share of this FDI. In addition to greenfield and expansion investment, a major vehicle for inward FDI has been the acquisition of UKcompanies.This paper examines whether nationally distinct approaches to management were introduced, following acquisition, among a sample of 201 UK subsidiaries of French, German, Japanese,US and UK companies. It provides data on the extent of changes and the post‐acquisition influence of the new parent, comparing changes between the four foreign nationalities and a UK control group.The study indicates that the process of being acquired and controlled by a foreign parent company was often followed by significant changes in management practice. Some changes were common to all acquisitions, including those by UK companies. A shift towards performance‐related rewards and a stronger quality emphasis in operations are two examples. In addition, there was also evidence of effects which differed between nationalities. These conformed to accepted characterizations of national management practice in the case of Japanese and US acquirers, but less so in the case of French and German acquisitions. The findings suggest that present views of French and German management practice require further investigation.

Acquisition of Nein and Nicht and the VP-Internal Subject Stage in German

Deprez and Pierce (1993) used negation data from German and other languages to support the hypothesis that subject noun phrases (NPs) originate within verb phrases (VPs). Deprez and Pierce argued that children go through an early stage of language acquisition during which subject NPs may optionally stay VP-internal. They claimed that during this stage, children do not distinguish between the negators nicht 'not' and nein 'no'. As a result, children produce negative utterances involving either negator, in which the negator occurs to the left of the subject. In their work, Deprez and Pierce did not systematically analyze German acquisition data, but rather relied on anecdotal data and examples cited in the literature. In this article, we analyze the negative utterances said by German-speaking children in transcripts of spontaneous speech. Contrary to Deprez and Pierce's claims, the results of our analyses indicate that German-speaking children distinguish between nicht and nein, using nicht in sentence-medial position for sentential negation and nein in sentence- initial position for anaphoric negation. Also contrary to Deprez and Pierce's theory, once negative utterances without overt subjects, anaphoric negatives, quantifier negatives, and unclear or stuttered negatives are excluded, there is no evidence that German-speaking children go through an early stage during which negation appears to the left of subject NPs.

Computational approaches to language acquisition Ed. by Michael R. Brent (review)

190 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 75, NUMBER 1 (1999) ond language (L2) acquisition by untutored adult immigrants . Already published are studies of utterance structure, temporality, and the lexicon, all based on data (stored in CHILDES) from the same 40 learners. The approach is cross-linguistic and longitudinal, with data collected 20-25 times over a two-year interval from learners of varied first languages (Lis) acquiring varied L2s ab initio. Each observational session elicited learner language referring to spatial relations via picture description and stage direction tasks, supplemented occasionally by other communicative activities and by the informants' incidental uses of spatial terms in conversation with native L2speaking experimenters. This design was held consistent by research teams at different sites, with members of those teams contributing separate chapters to the book. Ch. 1, by Angelika Becker and Clive Perdue, gives general background. In Ch. 2, B presents a theoretical framework pitched at somewhat too abstract a level. More liberal use of examples and a visual display of the relationships among the complex taxonomy ofspatial relations and terms would help. Ch. 3, by Mary Carroll , reports the acquisition ofEnglish by two Italian speakers; B's Ch. 4 addresses acquisition of German by four Italian speakers and one Turkish speaker; Ch. 5, by Jorge Giacobbe, Clive Perdue, and Rémi Porquier describes the acquisition of French by two Spanish speakers and one Moroccan Arabic speaker. Carroll's Ch. 6 concludes with a survey ofthe results. In the absence of a theory of acquisition in the relevant domain, the approach is explicitly 'datadriven and inductive' (2), making it easy to get lost in the masses of descriptive data presented for each informant in Chs. 3-5. Those data are revealing both with regard to the process of acquisition and with regard to what they communicate about the properties of the source and target languages. They also, happily, model what it means to view L2 acquisition (relatively) unobstructed by the 'comparative fallacy ', that is, free from the tendency to see interlanguage grammars as flawed or partial versions of native speakers' grammars. I can only summarize here some of the overall findings. All early learners arrive at a comparable 'basic variety' of their L2. They may first represent spatial relations by simple juxtaposition, then start to encode dynamic relations (movement along an axis, or movement toward or away) in whatever formal devices the L2 exploits. For static spatial relations , topological terms (inside, near) emerge before axis-based terms (above, left) because the latter require perspective-based computation. Past the basic variety, how space is conceived and represented in the Ll shapes learners' interlanguage systems, as evidenced in acquisitional order variations between learners of different Lis. The research finds that divergence between Ll and L2 in the conceptualization of space and in the encoding of spatial relations leads to slower and more idiosyncratic developmental paths. In addition, greater conceptual complexity (for example, that represented in the word between) delays acquisition across the board. [Margaret Thomas, Boston College.] Computational approaches to language acquisition. Ed. by Michael R. Brent. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. Pp. 199. There has been a movement in recent years away from rule-based theories of language acquisition to understanding how developmental and statistical constraints on natural language development give rise to infant speech and language processing ability. These models can be divided into two broad categories : First, artificial neural network models have provided a limited developmental account (in reading, for example) of how mappings from orthography to phonology can be 'learned' by statistical approximation using many ubiquitous nonlinear predictors. The second approach has sought to determine the statistical conditions necessary for developing language and specifying processes which might satisfy these conditions (the 'bootstrapping' approach). Autonomous bootstrapping is the subject of this volume of papers reprinted from a special issue of Cognition. Brent presents an overview of computational approaches to the acquisition of natural language in infancy which are based on bootstrapping hypotheses and integrates key results from the four research papers reprinted in the volume. These papers address semantic , prosodie, and syntactic bootstrapping issues although an account of the acquisition of regular and irregular verb morphologies is absent. The papers are presented in a complementary way...

The interplay between language specific development and cross-linguistic influences: Evidence from the simultaneous acquisition of German and English

The interplay between language specific development and cross-linguistic influences: Evidence from the simultaneous acquisition of German and English

The acquisition of the syntax of negation in French and German: contrasting first and second language development

The acquisition of negation is perhaps the best-studied syntactic phenomenon in early interlanguage research,and many of these publications concluded that first (L1) and second language (L2) development had much more in common than had previously been assumed. In the present paper, the problem of whether the same underlying principles and mechanisms guide L1 and L2 acquisition will be re-examined from the perspective of more recent grammatical theory. The empirical basis consists of longitudinal case-studies of the acquisition of French and German as first and second languages. The L2 learners' first language is Spanish. In L1 data one finds a rapid, uniform and almost error-free course of development across languages exhibiting quite different morphosyntactic means of expressing negation. This is explained in terms of Parameter Theory, primarily referring to functional categories determining the placement of finite verbal elements. L2 acquisition, on the other hand, is characterized by considerable variability, not only crosslinguistically, but also across learners and even within individuals. This can be accounted for by assuming different strategies of language use. More importantly, different kinds of linguistic knowledge are drawn upon in L1 as opposed to L2. It is claimed that adult L2 learners, rather than using structure-dependent operations constrained by Universal Grammar (UG), rely primarily on linear sequencing strategies which apply to surface strings.

Entfaltung grammatischer Relationen im NP-Erwerb: Referenz

The acquisition of the different types of nominal reference in first language acquisition of German is closely connected with the expansion of the structural complexity of the noun phrase and the acquisition of determiners - especially the so-called definite and indefinite article. It is assumed that the structure of grammar and the emergence of grammatical categories is based on the differentiation and specification of general cognitive and semantic concepts. The acquisition of the reference functions of the noun phrase provides evidence for this assumption. What could be observed up to the age of three is a step by step development of structural and referential properties of the noun phrase. The course of structural expansion is fairly well known already. It could be shown that in line with this process a differentiation of reference functions by the acquisition of features specifying the concept of reference is happening. The specifying features are derived form perceptive categories. Every new feature provides a specification of the previous stage and contains the features of all previous stages. So the acquisition of grammar becomes clearly a process of step by step dissociation of concepts and growth of feature complexity. The basic feature that is to be assumed here is [+nominal] which should contain the general reference capacity of nouns. Thc first specification takes place by the emergence of the feature [+definite] symbolising the perceptive quality of an outside perspective (the reference object is to be perceived as an outlined whole). The formal structure realising that kind of reference which still remains undetermined is the so-called indefinite article. After some steps of semantical specifications the next step of grammaticalization occurs the emergence of the feature [+known] realised by the so-called definite article. It provides a specification of the [+definite] domain and the ability to differentiate between undetermined and individual refere

The early stages in adult L2 syntax: additional evidence from Romance speakers

Vainikka and Young-Scholten (1994) propose an analysis of the acquisition of German by adult Korean and Turkish speakers based on the Weak Continuity account of L1 acquisition. They claim that L2 acquisition initially involves a bare VP whose (final) headedness is transferred from the learner's L1, with functional projections evolving entirely on the basis of the interaction of X'- Theory with the input. In this article, we extend this account to data from Italian and Spanish speakers learning German. Our analysis reveals that these learners initially posit a bare VP whose (initial) headedness is transferred from their native languages but, while still at the bare VP stage, they adopt the head-final VP of German. At this bare VP stage the morphological elements incompatible with the VP are not attested (e.g., auxiliary verbs, verbs marked for agreement and obligatory subjects). At the next stage of acquisition, simi lar to what Vainikka and Young-Scholten observed for the Korean and Turkish speakers, the Italian and Spanish speakers posit a head-initial func tional projection. This projection further resembles the first functional projec tion observed in the acquisition of German by children (Clahsen, 1991) and involves optional verb-raising and the emergence of elements which typically appear in INFL (auxiliaries, modals) and in Spec (IP) (obligatory subjects). We conclude that child L1 learners and adult L2 learners build up syntactic structure in much the same manner and propose that the Weak Continuity approach accounts for all instances of syntactic acquisition.

Bilingualism and language development in infancy: Acquisition of Turkish and german by migrant children in Germany

Bilingualism and language development in infancy: Acquisition of Turkish and german by migrant children in Germany

Early Syntactic Acquisition in German: Evidence for the Modal Hypothesis

Early Syntactic Acquisition in German: Evidence for the Modal Hypothesis

Pre-Basic Varieties

Three of the traditional questions in (second) language acquisition research are: 1. What is acquired, in what order? 2. How is it acquired? 3. Why is it acquired? In this paper, I concentrate on (1) and (3), proposing a description of various learners' paths towards various L2s, and examining different factors which may explain the course of acquisition. The learners were, for the most part, recorded during the European Science Foundation's study of the spontaneous (untutored) acquisition of Dutch, French, English and German (Perdue 1993); other comparable studies will also be discussed. The emphasis is placed on the beginning stages of acquisition in an attempt to demonstrate that these stages are crucial for an understanding of the whole process. It will be argued (a) that there are stages (grammars) through which all learners pass, (b) that these stages can be characterised explicitly, but (c) the description of these stages, and of the transition between them, is not reducible to a single-level analysis, and (d) distance between (source and target) language pairs partially determines the amount of useful knowledge available to the absolute beginner.

Do orthographic and phonological peculiarities of alphabetically written languages influence the course of literacy acquisition?

The most important cognitive models of alphabetic literacy acquisition, like those proposed by Uta Frith and Philip Seymour (cf. Frith 1985, and Seymour & Elder 1986), are presented as models of the way alphabetic orthographies in general are learned even though they are inspired by the study of the acquisition of a single orthography, needless to specify it, the English one. Indeed, it is not the fault of scholars working in English-speaking countries if the cognitive psycholinguistics of the written language has been much less pushed on in the other countries. However, everybody admits that it is important to check how and to what extent the orthographic peculiarities of alphabetic languages influence the course of literacy acquisition. Why could or should orthography-related differences in literacy acquisition arise? English presents a relatively opaque system: there are many alternatives to spell phonemes and many ways of sounding out graphemes, and, in addition, many of the correspondences cannot be predicted from contextdependent graphophonological rules. Other languages present a much higher degree of orthographic transparency, either in one conversion direction (from spelling to sound or from sound to spelling) or in both directions. Literacy onset in languages having a highly transparent orthography might exhibit a much more precocious and systematic use of phonological decoding than is the case in English. Besides, some characteristics of the spoken language, like complexity of the syllabic structure (for example, clusters of two and three consonants at the onset and offset of the syllable) and number of vowels, might also influence the acquisition of the corresponding written language. English presents both a high number of vowels and of complex syllabic structures. These two characteristics of the language might not encourage or facilitate the resort to phonological transcoding in reading and writing. Compared to English, access to phonological transcoding might thus be easier for languages having either a small number of vowels or relatively simple phonological structures or both. Recently, Wimmer & Goswami (1994) compared reading acquisition in English and German. In German, the mapping between graphemes and phonemes is largely consistent. The results of this study suggest a much more

The German Spelling Reform: Its Impact on the Acquisition and Teaching of German

Now that the German spelling reform is closer to becoming reality, American teachers and students of German will have to deal with a new orthographic reality and consider its impact. In this paper, I will provide a brief historical background of the reform and will then discuss its effect on the teaching and acquisition of German spelling within an English-language context. Finally, after nearly two decades of intensive workby various commissions, after many meetings and intense and often acrimonious public discussions, the reform of the orthographic system for German is close to becoming reality. It has already been ratified by the governments of Austria and Switzerland, though ratification has been postponed in Germany in order to answer some lastminute questions. The official endorsement of the reform will legalize the changes worked out by various international commissions and sanctioned by the representatives of the three countries involved in the so-called Wiener Gespriche, which took place on three occasions between 1986 and 1994. After the final ratification of the new set of rules, the three countries will be committed to introducing the new system over the next five years. The proposed deadline for the transition period is the year 2001, at which point the new rules will be binding for all official transactions and for the schools. Private citizens can follow their own inclinations but will be encouraged to adopt the new system.1 This spelling reform will be the first in nearly 100 years. However, the system of rules regulating German orthography has not remained static during the past century. It has been controlled and elaborated on by the publications of a private publishing house, namely the Duden Verlag. Eventually, the Duden became the arbiter of the German spelling system.2 The main goal of the first reform (1901) was the creation of a uniform orthographic system for all of German-speaking Europe. No efforts were made at that time to improve the system by simplifying or regularizing it. Since that time, several recommendations for modernizingthe spelling system such as the extensive Stuttgarter and Wiesbadener Empfehlungen of the fifties were published but had little effect. it was only in the late seventies and early eighties that the reform movement became more active, centering around the work of the Institut ffr deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim. Finally, in 1986, the Kultusministerkonferenz instructed the IDS to come up with detailed recommendations for reform. The overall goal was to make the system of rules more user-friendly, while keeping in mind the present system and suggesting only changes that could be justified both on pragmatic and on linguistic grounds. The general motto was: Don't touch basic rules, but adjust irregularities by getting rid of special rules for small groups of words. This specifically entailed looking at the rule system in those areas which had become increasingly complicated over the years and which presented the greatest difficulties to users of the system. In 1977, the IDES formed a commission, the Internationaler Arbeitskreis for Orthographie, which included members from all four German-speaking countries, namely Austria, Switzerland, the Federal Republic of Germany and, at that time, the German Democratic Republic. In 1992, the commission published its complete proposal.3 Beginning in 1986 and in the following years, representatives of the governments in question met in the so-called Wiener Gesprcche zurNeuregelung der deutschen Rechtschreibung. At each meeting, some of the proposals were provisionally accepted until a complete reform package was finalized in November 1994 and is now awaiting the official signatures.

Speech perception and the learnability of languages

To what extent can natural human languages as abstract systems be learned without any prior (innate?) knowledge of the abstract principles that universally constrain their structure, and why are natural human languages universally restricted as to the kinds of phonological contrasts that occur? This paper explores some aspects of this issue with respect to the contribution of phonology in first (L1) and, to a lesser extent, second language (L2) acquisition. The evidence derives from speech perception, babbling, early L1 and L2 phonemic development, and in particular from new production data on the L1 acquisition of German. It is argued that the evolution of the phonological systems of natural languages and the typology of distinctive features, even in production phonology, is based on the perceptual discontinuities of the auditory system of homo sapiens, that these innate sensitivities are also relied on by neonates for the acquisition of sound systems, and that certain kinds of phonological variation in very early child phonology result from the way mental representations of lexical items develop in children. It is suggested that this functional potential of speech perception provides for the biological basis of sound systems and, consequently, for phonological theory.

Why two are not always better than one: effects of the non‐integrated execution of related syntactic and morphological rules

This paper discusses the interaction of rules concerning verb placement and verbal conjugation in the acquisition of German as a foreign language. Using constrained written tasks, it is shown that (1) accuracy in verbal conjugation varies by word‐order environment (SV(X), XVS, or SXV) and (2) accuracy in verbal conjugation improves in tasks which focus solely on conjugation, while accuracy in verb placement does not improve in tasks which focus solely on verb placement. The findings are interpreted from the perspective of cognitive learning theory and contrasted with the tenet that rule interaction is a characteristic of the effects of Universal Grammar parametric trigger‐mechanisms only. Furthermore, the formulation of expectations with regard to acquisitional progress on the basis of linguistic paradigms is challenged.

Effects of Alternative Goodwill Treatments on Merger Premia: Further Empirical Evidence

AbstractIn this study, we extend our analysis of the effects of international accounting diversity on market behavior. Specifically we examine whether national differences in the treatment of purchased goodwill are associated with differences in premia offered by non‐U.S. acquirers other than the British when bidding for U.S. target companies. We find merger premia offered by foreign acquirors who enjoy advantageous accounting or tax treatments relative to U.S. acquirors to be higher, on average, than those offered by U.S. acquirors. Regression analyses show that goodwill accounting does explain merger premia. The higher coefficient on goodwill in German acquisitions, relative to Japanese acquisitions, indicates that merger premia are associated with accounting diversity among various countries in the sense that, while tax benefits are available in both Japan and Germany, more favorable accounting treatments are operative in the latter.

Pragmatic, Semantic, and Syntactic Constraints and Grammaticalization

This contribution will compare the acquisition of German of three adult Poles over a period of 3 years. As background to the acquisition of grammatical features in German (e. g., morphology, auxiliary and modal verbs, constituency structure, temporality), an acquisition profile of the informants will be constructed. With the help of computer-aided corpus descriptions, the sequences in acquisition will be specified.