Child L2 Research Articles

Chinese L1 children's English L2 verb morphology over time: individual variation in long-term outcomes.

This study examined accuracy in production and grammaticality judgements of verb morphology by eighteen Chinese-speaking children learning English as a second language (L2) followed longitudinally from four to six years of exposure to English, and who began to learn English at age 4;2. Children's growth in accuracy with verb morphology reached a plateau by six years, where 11/18 children did not display native-speaker levels of accuracy for one or more morphemes. Variation in children's accuracy with verb morphology was predicted by their English vocabulary size and verbal short-term memories primarily, and quality and quantity of English input at home secondarily. This study shows that even very young L2 learners might not all catch up to native speakers in this time frame and that non-age factors play a role in determining individual variation in child L2 learners' long-term outcomes with English morphology.

Comparing heritage speakers and late L2-learners of European Portuguese

Abstract This study compares the performance of Portuguese-German heritage children and adult L2 speakers of European Portuguese whose L1 is German with respect to two aspects of grammar, adverb placement and VP-ellipsis, which depend on a core syntactic property of the language, verb movement. The results show that both groups have acquired V-to-I and adverb placement, showing no influence of a V2 grammar. Performance in the VP-ellipsis task is more complex: heritage children produce VP-ellipsis at the level of controls, as opposed to L2 speakers; however, both L2 and heritage speakers show that cross-linguistic influence may produce a preference for pronoun substitution over VP-ellipsis in a task asking for redundancy resolution. Nevertheless, given that overall results show that heritage children perform at the level of L1 children, we take our results to support approaches to heritage bilingualism which suggest the development of an intact grammar in childhood.

How early L2 children perform on Italian clinical markers of SLI: A study of clitic production and nonword repetition

ABSTRACTEarly second language (EL2) learners generally perform more poorly than monolinguals in specific language domains, presenting similarities with children affected by specific language impairment (SLI). As a consequence, it can be difficult to correctly diagnose this disorder in EL2 children. The current study investigated the performance of 120 EL2 and 40 age-matched monolingual children in object clitic production and nonword repetition, which are two sensitive clinical markers of SLI in Italian. Results show that EL2 children underperform in comparison to monolinguals in the clitic task. However, in contrast to what is reported on Italian-speaking children with SLI, EL2 children tend not to omit clitics but instead produce the incorrect form, committing agreement errors. No differences are found between EL2 and monolingual children on nonword repetition. These results suggest that, at least in Italian, EL2 children only superficially resemble children with SLI and, on closer inspection, present a qualitatively and quantitatively different linguistic profile.

The development of narrative skills in learners of Basque as a second language

The aim of this paper is to analyse some aspects of development of Basque as a second language (L2) in children for whom Spanish is their first language (L1) who attended immersion school in Basque in a Spanish-speaking sociolinguistic context. Data consist of oral story retellings produced in a classroom setting where the same children participated at ages 5, 8 and 11. Another group of children for whom Basque was the L1 and who lived in a strong Basque-speaking environment also took part in the study. Two aspects are analysed in the stories: lexical difficulties and the production of text organisers. According to the results, the Basque L2 children seemed to have acquired a linguistic competence quite comparable to L1 capacity: the lexical aspects studied show a clear development in L2, since lexical gaps were frequent at age 5, diminished at age 8 and were practically non-existent at age 11. The production of text organisers also shows a clear developmental pattern and, with increasing age, the children produced a higher variety of text organisers, providing precise temporal links to different segments of the story. It is concluded that Basque immersion seems to foster the development of Basque L2 in contexts where the use of Basque is quite reduced.

Providing some more pieces to the puzzle

Providing some more pieces to the puzzle

아동의 제2언어습득 연구에 대한 비판적 고찰

아동의 제2언어습득 연구에 대한 비판적 고찰

Effects of a Whole-Class Reading Program Designed for Different Reading Levels and the Learning Needs of L1 and L2 Children

This article aims to evaluate the whole-class reading program Language And Reading Skills (LARS) and its effects on the decoding, reading comprehension, and language abilities of 1st-language (L1) and 2nd-language (L2) German 2nd graders. The program consisted of teacher training and differentiated reading materials adapted to the needs of both L1 and L2 learners. The materials targeted 4 different reading levels. For the evaluation, we used a pre-/posttest design with a comparison group. We assessed the decoding, reading comprehension, and language abilities of all students (n = 377) before and after the implementation of the program. A total of 159 students received reading instruction twice a week with the LARS program during regular school hours for a period of 7 months. Another 218 students received conventional reading instruction without special materials (e.g., no differentiated materials) provided by the research team. The results indicate that the program significantly improved the development of reading comprehension and expressive vocabulary (trained words).

How do verbal short-term memory and working memory relate to the acquisition of vocabulary and grammar? A comparison between first and second language learners

Previous studies show that verbal short-term memory (VSTM) is related to vocabulary learning, whereas verbal working memory (VWM) is related to grammar learning in children learning a second language (L2) in the classroom. In this study, we investigated whether the same relationships apply to children learning an L2 in a naturalistic setting and to monolingual children. We also investigated whether relationships with verbal memory differ depending on the type of grammar skill investigated (i.e., morphology vs. syntax). Participants were 63 Turkish children who learned Dutch as an L2 and 45 Dutch monolingual children (mean age=5years). Children completed a series of VSTM and VWM tasks, a Dutch vocabulary task, and a Dutch grammar task. A confirmatory factor analysis showed that VSTM and VWM represented two separate latent factors in both groups. Structural equation modeling showed that VSTM, treated as a latent factor, significantly predicted vocabulary and grammar. VWM, treated as a latent factor, predicted only grammar. Both memory factors were significantly related to the acquisition of morphology and syntax. There were no differences between the two groups. These results show that (a) VSTM and VWM are differentially associated with language learning and (b) the same memory mechanisms are employed for learning vocabulary and grammar in L1 children and in L2 children who learn their L2 naturalistically.

Transfer and semantic universals in the L2 acquisition of the English article system by child L2 learners

ABSTRACTL2 learners’ problems with English articles have been linked to learners’ L1 and their access to universal semantic features (e.g., definiteness and specificity). Studies suggest that L2 adults rely on their L1 knowledge, while child L2 learners rely more on their access to semantic universals. The present study investigates whether child L2 learners access features like adult L2 learners (i.e., reassembling the features of the L1) or as L1 acquirers (i.e., choosing from the inventory of universal features). We evaluated the acquisition of English articles in 30 Spanish-speaking children learning English as their L2 and found that they transfer knowledge from their L1 much in the same way as do adults. However, the error analysis also suggests that article acquisition in child L2 learners is restricted by Universal Grammar resembling L1 acquisition. In conclusion, we propose that article acquisition in child L2 learners patterns with both adult L2 and L1 acquisition.

Film and Language Acquisition

Film and Language Acquisition Bill VanPatten (bio) “Film is the greatest educational medium the world has ever known.” —Preston Sturges In the twenty first century, film ought to occupy a central spot in any language department. This should be the case whether one examines graduate studies, programs for undergraduate majors and minors, or basic language programs. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Written text still reigns supreme. It is not my place to argue why this is so, just as it is not my place to argue what an undergraduate or graduate program should look like when its emphasis is literature and culture. I will instead approach the issue of the role of film from the viewpoint of language and language acquisition. And I will begin with the central concept of input. After four plus decades of research on second language acquisition, it is now fact that the acquisition of language (that is, the acquisition of an abstract and complex mental representation of language) happens as a result of three minimal components: input, internal mental architecture, and the mechanisms that mediate between input and the internal architecture. (For some discussion, see Gass, Behney, and Plonsky 2013; as well as VanPatten and Williams 2015.) That is, language is not acquired because of practice but because of exposure to language in communicative events. Many readers may recognize this statement as another way of saying that exposure to input is necessary for language acquisition. Input is simply language that one hears (or sees) that is part of communication, the latter being defined as the expression, interpretation, and negotiation of meaning in a given context. In other words, input is language that we attend to for its propositional content and intent. There is not a single aspect of language that is not acquired through the interaction of the internal learning architecture with communicative input. (I am purposefully not specifying what the internal architecture is in this essay. It is not necessary to do so in order to make my main point.) Thus, everything from lexicon (words and their properties) to language specific syntactic operations (movement) to morphology (the inflectional properties of words) to phonology (sounds, sound sequences, syllabic structure, intonation), and more gets into our heads because of the interaction of input with internal architecture. So what does this have to do with film? As one might guess, for students who do not have consistent contact with speakers of another language, film can be a significant source of input. Because learners will watch film and listen to interactions between characters, film is communicative input. But why advocate for the inclusion of film as part of language development? Let us consider for a moment the odds that are stacked against a typical second language learner when it comes to input. To do so, let’s start with child first language (L1) acquisition. We now know that acquisition may actually begin in the womb. We also know that some very important aspects of acquisition happen during the first year after birth (e.g., various aspects of phonological acquisition). We also know that for all intents and purposes, acquisition of the formal [End Page 391] aspects of language is pretty much in place by the age of five (with peripheral and marked parts of language coming in with literacy development and exposure to complex discourse; see, for example, Pinker 2007). So, let’s focus on these years of acquisition: one to five years of age, or four years. Assuming an average of eight hours a day multiplied by seven days a week multiplied by 52 weeks a year multiplied by four years, we come up with 8 × 7 × 52 × 4 = 11,648 hours. A child L1 learner then gets close to 12,000 hours of input and interaction with that input during early childhood. And just to be sure, let me repeat that we are ignoring here the impact of literacy on continued communicative and discursive development including pragmatics, vocabulary, rhetoric/discourse and other non-formal aspects of language. Now let’s consider a typical adult taking Spanish as a college student who begins with Spanish 101 (first semester). That student is in class for four hours...

Acquisition of the imparfait in L2 French in adults and children: The same or different?

In this study, we provide a comparison of adult and child L2 acquisition in relation to their use of the imparfait form in L2 French. Previous research on this form shows that it is an area of considerable difficulty, being lexically and functionally restricted in use even in advanced stages of acquisition. In the study presented here, we compare our child and adult learners in an immersion setting, where the adult learners were studying at a French university, while the children were attending a French immersion school. Their use of the imparfait is explored through a longitudinal lens, where we look in particular at its use to mark different aspectual values, as well as its lexical use with different verbs. The findings indicate that, while both groups benefit from the immersion context, the children’s development seems to be more rapid and more stable: once they start using the imparfait productively, they use it for a greater range of its aspectual values and in a more autonomous way than the adults. The results are discussed with regard to age of onset and the development of L1 and L2 discourse capacities.

How children "add" or "restrict" entities and temporal spans in narrations: evidence from Italian and English native children

This work focuses on the acquisition of restrictive and (temporal and non temporal) additive means by Italian and English native children, especially including scope particles, together with children's progressing ability to build textual cohesion in a narrative text. In particular, the author tries to identify the age at which additive and restrictive means appear and the functions they carry out in discourse organization of very young subjects, as well as the cognitive operations the latter can use. Thanks to the consideration of two different languages, this work also explores the possible language-specific strategies exploited by the two groups of children. Part of the results can be read as age cognitive restrictions independent of the L1 of the child. Additive means appear from the age of four on but with some differences according to the types of quantification solicited, namely the quantification of entities and that of time spans: the 4-year-olds clearly have less problems in quantifying entities rather than time spans. In comparison with adult reference groups, Italian and English L1 children of any group exploit additive temporal means less frequently than means quantifying entities; the quantification of entities involving a negation shows up from the age of seven. From a cognitive viewpoint, the precocious emergence of entity contrasts by additive means is in agreement with what Givón (1995) maintains with respect to nominal referents (they are perceptually and cognitively more salient, they are acquired early in ontogeny and evolve early in phylogeny, they are culturally central entities etc.). Concerning negative particles, their later appearance is in agreement with some studies about negation showing the more problematic processing of negative structures by children with respect to the positive ones (cf. Giuliano 2004). Some other strategies identified in children's retellings are, conversely, to be interpreted as language-specific. The more frequent problems that Italian children have with the concept of iteration with respect to English L1 children could be due to the polyfunctional semantics of the Italian particles ancora ('more, again, still') and sempre ('always, again, still'); the late appearance of also in English L2 children's data, an internal positioning particle, is probably caused by the fact that English has an external, perceptually more salient particle, namely too, whose semantics is equal to that of also.

Exploring the source of differences and similarities in L1 attrition and heritage speaker competence: Evidence from pronominal resolution

Several studies of different bilingual groups including L2 learners, child bilinguals, heritage speakers and L1 attriters reveal similar performance on syntax-discourse interface properties such as anaphora resolution (Sorace, 2011 and references therein). Specifically, bilinguals seem to allow more optionality in the interpretation of overt subject pronouns in null subject languages, such as Greek, Italian and Spanish while the interpretation of null subject pronouns is indistinguishable from monolingual natives. Nevertheless, there is some evidence pointing to bilingualism effects on the interpretation of null subject pronouns too in heritage speakers’ grammars (Montrul, 2004) due to some form of ‘arrested’ development in this group of bilinguals. The present study seeks to investigate similarities and differences between two Greek–Swedish bilingual groups, heritage speakers and L1 attriters, in anaphora resolution of null and overt subject pronouns in Greek using a self-paced listening with a sentence-picture matching decision task at the end of each sentence. The two groups differ in crucial ways: heritage speakers were simultaneous or early bilinguals while the L1 attriters were adult learners of the second language, Swedish. Our findings reveal differences from monolingual preferences in the interpretation of the overt pronoun for both heritage and attrited speakers while the differences attested between the two groups in the interpretation of null subject pronouns affect only response times with heritage being faster than attrited speakers. We argue that our results do not support an age of onset or differential input effects on bilingual performance in pronoun resolution.

Degree of Perceived Accent in Finnish as a Second Language for Turkish Children Born in Finland

This study investigated whether children born in a second language (L2) environment pronounce their L2 with foreign accents and, if so, when foreign accents first emerge. This study also examined the latest age of onset (AO) of extensive L2 experience at which native L2 pronunciation is possible and explored several factors that affect the degree of perceived accent for child L2 learners. Participants included 20 native Finnish children and 19 Finnish‐born Turkish children 7–17 years of age (mean AO = 3) as well as 61 native Finnish raters who evaluated the speech samples for foreign accent using a 9‐point scale. Only 4 of the 19 Turkish children spoke Finnish without foreign accents, which were first detectable at an AO of 2.5 years. AO was the main determiner of perceived accent, followed by home use of first language (L1), and the amount of L2 and L1 use. These findings suggest that there is an interplay between AO and language use factors in determining child L2 learners’ accent.

Sensitivity to ungrammatical object drop in English by Korean young and adult L2 learners

This study looks at age effects in second language acquisition by exploring whether child L2 learners have an advantage over adult L2 learners in...

Do early successive bilinguals show the English L2 pattern of precocious BE acquisition?

This study investigated the role of age-of-acquisition in determining whether young bilingual children show a pattern of L2/nonnative English, precocious BE acquisition, or whether they show the L1/native English pattern of synchronous acquisition of BE and inflectional morphology. Two groups of children with age-of-acquisition before or after 4;0 and equivalent exposure to L2 English were given production and grammaticality-judgement tasks. The children in both age-of-acquisition groups showed the precocious BE pattern, regardless of L1 background and on both tasks. We conclude that, for this aspect of morphosyntax, bilingual children who begin to learn English after age 3;0 are best characterized as child L2 rather than bilingual L1 learners.

The Role of Models and Error Correction in L2 Young Learners’ Noticing and Output

Despite the increasing interest in noticing by second language (L2) learners during the output process, little attention has been given to child L2 learners’ noticing and output. Thus, the present study investigated what child L2 learners of different English proficiency levels noticed as they composed a text and received written corrective feedback (WCF) (error correction vs. models), and how they incorporated the noticed features into their revised texts. Data were collected from twenty-six child pairs throughout three stages (composition, comparison, and revision stages) and note-taking was employed as a means of measuring learner noticing. It was found that learners were able to initiate noticing on their own when composing texts, and that highproficiency learners tended to attend to grammatical problems more frequently than medium/low-proficiency learners. WCF played a facilitative role in leading learners to notice, and their attention to language was mediated differently by different types of WCF. Learners incorporated the noticed features into their revisions, and textual revisions were mostly lexical. Error correction (EC) triggered more grammatical revisions, while the model text helped learners to notice something beyond what they could produce on their own. These findings suggest a facilitative role for output and WCF as a means of learner noticing, and the different roles of EC and model texts.

Phonological Memory and the Acquisition of Grammar in Child L2 Learners

Previous studies show that second language (L2) learners with large phonological me‐mory spans outperform learners with smaller memory spans on tests of L2 grammar. The current study investigated the relationship between phonological memory and L2 grammar in more detail than has been done earlier. Specifically, we asked how phonological memory relates to specific L2 grammar skills, after controlling for L2 vocabulary, and using different phonological memory tasks. Participants were 36 Turkish child learners of Dutch and 34 Dutch first‐language (L1) children. All participants completed a Dutch narrative task to assess their production of subject–verb agreement, auxiliaries, and verb placement, and a Dutch vocabulary test. Phonological memory was measured through serial recall of Dutch words, high‐probability nonwords, and low‐probability nonwords. The results show weak correlations between phonological memory and grammar in the L1 group due to ceiling effects. For the L2 group, moderate to strong correlations between phonological memory and grammar were found. Regression analyses showed that word recall significantly predicted all three L2 grammar skills, above and beyond vocabulary. These findings indicate that the ability to temporarily store L2 material in phonological memory is important for L2 grammar learning, but that specifics of the memory tasks also play a role.

Developmental stages in receptive grammar acquisition: A Processability Theory account

This study takes a new look at the topic of developmental stages in the second language (L2) acquisition of morphosyntax by analysing receptive learner data, a language mode that has hitherto received very little attention within this strand of research (for a recent and rare study, see Spinner, 2013). Looking at both the receptive and productive side of grammar acquisition, however, is necessary for a better understanding of developmental systematicity and of the relationship between receptive and productive grammar acquisition more widely, as well as for the construction of a comprehensive theory of second language acquisition (SLA). In the present exploratory study, the receptive acquisition of L2 English grammar knowledge is studied cross-sectionally within a Processability Theory (PT) framework (Pienemann, 1998, 2005b), a theory of L2 grammar acquisition which makes explicit predictions about the order in which L2 learners learn to productively process different morphosyntactic phenomena. Participants are 72 francophone beginning child L2 learners (age 6–9) acquiring English in an immersion program. The learners’ ability to process six morphosyntactic phenomena situated at extreme ends of the developmental hierarchy proposed by PT was tested by means of the ELIAS Grammar Test, a picture selection task. Overall, the developmental orders obtained through implicational scaling for the six target phenomena agreed with PT’s predictions, suggesting that similar mechanisms underlie the acquisition of receptive and productive L2 grammar processing skills.

Assessing Reading and Spelling Abilities from Three Different Angles – Correlations between Test Scores, Teachers’ Assessment and Children's Self-assessments in L1 and L2 Children

Aside from by standardized tests, students’ reading (decoding, reading comprehension) and spelling abilities can also be assessed by teachers or by self-assessment. This study investigated the correlations of these three types of assessment, taking children's L1 into account. Analyses revealed that, for L1 (n=317) and L2 (n=247) children, teachers’ assessments moderately correlate with test results and do not differentiate well between the abilities. Children's self-assessments showed lower correlations. Additionally, comparing L1 to L2 children, lower correlations were shown when L2 children assessed their decoding. Further analyses revealed that L2 children tend to overestimate their abilities. Results were discussed in the light of the importance of correct and distinct teacher judgements to provide individual support.