Second Language Acquisition in Early Childhood

By Jürgen M. Meisel. 2009

193 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There is a broad consensus in the research literature on the acquisition of bilingualism that the simultaneous acquisition of two (or more) languages can be qualified as an instance of bilingual first language (2L1) development; see de Houwer (1995) for a summarizing discussion of this issue. 2L1 children differentiate from early on the linguistic systems of the languages to which they are exposed (Meisel 1989), they proceed through the same developmental phases as the respective monolinguals, and they are able to attain native competence in each of their languages; see Meisel (2001, 2004) for state-of-the-art summaries of the relevant research. It therefore seems to be justified to assert that the human Language Making Capacity (LMC) constitutes an endowment for multilingualism. If, however, two or more languages are acquired successively, a very different picture emerges from the literature reporting on investigations of this type of language acquisition. Although it is not possible to summarize in a few words the long and ongoing debate on similarities and differences between first (L1) and second (L2) acquisition, successive

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Age of onset, length of residence, language aptitude, and ultimate L2 attainment in three linguistic domains (2013, background): “(For reviews supportive of the existence of maturational constraints on SLA, see, for example, DeKeyser, 2012; DeKeyser and LarsonHall, 2005; Hyltenstam and Abrahamsson, 2003; Long, 1990, 2007; Meisel, 2009, 2011; Newport, 2002.”
Assessing the role of current and cumulative exposure in simultaneous bilingual acquisition: The case of Dutch gender* (2012, background): “…the case of the L2 children in their study or more generally to the nature of the bilingual situation) means that the relevant “critical mass” of information to deduce this rule cannot be attained within a critical period which may end around age six or seven (Meisel, 2007b; see also Meisel, 2009).”
Individual differences in child English second language acquisition Comparing child-internal and child-external factors (2011, background): “Meisel (2009) argued that early child L2 learners of French struggle with grammatical gender and produce errors unattested in monolingual or bilingual L1 acquisition of French; therefore, he proposed that the language acquisition mechanisms for morphology might begin to diminish as early as age…”
The interface between bilingual development and specific language impairment (2010, background): “Therefore, another interesting direction for future research would be to investigate the possibility of facilitative crosslinguistic interactions in the morphosyntactic development of bilingual children, with and without SLI (cf. Rothweiler, 2009).”
Bilingual language acquisition and theories of diachronic change: Bilingualism as cause and effect of grammatical change* (2010, background): “Neurophysiological as well as some linguistic findings suggest, indeed, that a sensitive period for some grammatical phenomena begins to fade out as early as between age 3 and 4 years; see Meisel (2004, 2008a, 2009).”
Specific Language Impairment and Early Second Language Acquisition: The Risk of Over- and Underdiagnosis (2014, background): “2.2 Specific Language Impairment in eL2 Learners The age at onset of acquisition of the second language has been argued to crucially influence pace and success of acquisition (Hyltenstam 1992; Meisel 2009).”
The role of age of onset and input in early child bilingualism in Greek and Dutch (2011, background): “The relationship between input quantity and linguistic development is thus certainly not linear (Paradis & Genesee, 1996). A number of studies have examined the effect of amount of input/exposure on bilingual children’s acquisition of vocabulary and grammar/morphosyntax. For example, in a large-scal”