Previous studies of adult bilinguals have shown that cognates (translation equivalents similar in sound and spelling) are translated faster than non-cognates and different representations for the two categories in bilingual memory have been suggested (Kroll and Stewart 1994, van Hell and de Groot 1998). Assuming that bilingual children's representations are similar to those of adults, effects of form similarity between words should also be observed. This paper examines form-similar nouns in the early lexical development of a bilingual German/English child aged 1;11–2;9 as well as effects of form similarity in picture naming and translation in two groups of German/English children aged 8–9. Form similarity here differs from the cognate status of a word in that it implies similarity of sound only. Considering the way hearing children acquire words, it seemed necessary to restrict the similarity of words to this modality. Similarly, the presentation of items in the translation tasks was auditory. The results show an effect of form similarity in early lexical development, whereby form-similar words occurred frequently in the beginning of the observation period in both languages and were more likely to have a translation equivalent in the child's English. In the translation task, form similarity resulted in lower latencies for both language directions. The results thereby confirm that form similarity affects representations in both adult and child learners.

This article investigates whether the Aspect-before-Tense Hypothesis (Antinucci and Miller, 1976; Shirai and Andersen, 1995) accounts for the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology in child L2 English. The main question addressed is whether early uses of tense-aspect inflections can be analyzed as a spell-out of semantic/aspectual features of verbs (such as punctuality, telicity, durativity, etc.). The data are drawn from a detailed longitudinal study of an eight-year-old Russian-speaking child who was acquiring English as L2 in the USA. It is first shown that the emergence of tense-aspect morphology patterns by aspectual verb class. However, contrary to the Aspect-before-Tense Hypothesis, it is argued that the acquisition patterns cannot be attributed to “defective” tense, nor do they reflect the spell-out of aspectual features. A new approach to the data is developed that proposes underspecification of the syntactic aspectual head in early L2 child grammar.

Four bilingual speakers of Irish (Gaelic) and English, two men and two women, were audiorecorded as they produced narratives based on pictures from the Mercer Mayer book Frog, where are you? Order of narration was counterbalanced. The narratives were analyzed according to certain features of global and local structure originally identified in Berman and Slobin (1994). Differences within and across narratives emerged in the number of components included, the number of planning components explicitly marked for purpose, the marking of tense and aspect, and the use of extended aspectual categories. These variations were attributed to 1) the order in which the narrative was told (first-told versus second-told versions), 2) the language of the narrative (Irish versus English), and 3) the particular preferences of individual narrators.

This study describes how Turkish and Moroccan adults acquire Dutch possessive clauses in which the verb have expresses the possessive relationship. The acquisition process is explained within the framework of recent generative theory in which have-clauses are assumed to be copular locative constructions. In this theory, predicate inversion of the locative PP and incorporation of the locative P0 into a be-copula are the main characteristics of a possessive have-clause. Assuming that all linguistic knowledge of the L1 is present, L2 learners rely on it from the earliest stages, irrespective of whether this L1 knowledge is parameter-related or not. The results confirm such a “conservation” viewpoint, which accounts for how the possessive relationship is expressed in the earliest stages and why these learners have their language-specific difficulties in discovering the target have-construction. The results corroborate the conservation effect of both parametrized linguistic knowledge, viz., the strong features triggering predicate inversion, and non-parametrized knowledge, viz., knowledge of syntax, morphology and morphological realization rules, and properties of lexical items.