Language, Interaction and Acquisition - Volume 12, Issue 2, 2021

According to usage-based models of language acquisition, young children’s grammatical knowledge is best described in terms of lexically specific templates rather than abstract constructions. In this study, we tested the usage-based account by examining the acquisition of Italian, a language with relatively free word order and rich inflectional morphology. We exposed two groups of Italian-speaking children (aged 3;01 and 4;05) and adult controls to a nonce verb and to a familiar verb in an imperative construction. We then prompted production of those verbs in a different morphological form (past tense) and a different syntactic construction (transitive). While both child groups showed adult-like productivity with morphology, there were significant group differences in syntactic productivity.

In this study, we present a comparative corpus-based analysis of the English /s/ ~ /z/ voice contrast for learners of three L1s. Acoustic analysis of periodicity and duration for target segments confirms expectations based on L1 transfer and on the Markedness Differential Hypothesis. We found that, due to the absence of phonemic /z/ in Spanish, L1 Spanish learners exhibit great difficulty in producing voiced realisations for /z/, and more so in the (more marked) word-final position than in the (less marked) word-medial position. In contrast, L1 French and L1 Italian learners did not exhibit difficulties in reproducing the voicing patterns of English /s/ ~ /z/ neither word-medially nor word-finally, due to the existence of these sounds in their L1 (and despite differences in relative markedness for these two positions, especially considering that word-final /z/ does not exist in Italian). Finally, we observed the impact of orthography on the production of L1 French and L1 Italian learners, affecting the periodicity of /s/ and /z/ depending on spelling transparency.

Evidentiality, i.e. the linguistic encoding of the mode of access to information (direct perception, inference, hearsay), despite not being fully grammaticalized in English and French, is expressed through a variety of means. This paper seeks to determine how a relatively non-salient concept in the source and target languages can be acquired by L2 learners. Using an oral elicited narrative task, we determine what markers of direct perception and inference are commonly used by native speakers of French (n = 10) and English (n = 10) and L2 learners of those two languages (at three levels of proficiency, n = 10 per group), and at which level they emerge. Our results point to a much more frequent use of inferential markers than direct perception markers, to slightly different patterns of evidential marking in French and in English, and to a late emergence of evidential markers in the speech of learners, who display sensitivity to their discursive functions, with types and tokens increasing as a function of proficiency level.

This article reviews David Singleton’s books and articles published during the period 2014–2020. The first section concerns a popular book which he co-authored with Vivian Cook; the second gives an account of articles covering questions about the concept of language aptitude; the third deals with articles on the manner in which a learner’s competencies in different languages interact; the fourth section then summarizes his recent age-related work on second language learning in childhood, adolescence and midlife; and the fifth deals with his contributions on language learning in senior adulthood.