Abstract
This longitudinal study examines the acquisition of Japanese L2 content questions in an English-speaking background Australian child between age 7;0 and 8;9 comparing emerging patterns with monolingual (Clancy 1985) and simultaneous bilingual first language (BFL) acquirers (Di Biase & Itani-Adams 2016, Mishina-Mori 2005). Possible Cross-linguistic influence on word order is also examined. Our informant, John, acquired English from birth and learned Japanese from age 6;3 when he was enrolled in a Japanese primary school in Australia, hence he learned his L2 in a naturalistic environment. Using natural conversation and elicitation tasks speech data was collected over 26 sessions, beginning 9 months after enrolment and was examined in terms of the Prominence Hypothesis (Bettoni & Di Biase 2015) within Processability Theory (Pienemann1998). The child produced 373 content questions including nani (what), doko (where), doshite (why), and dare (who). After producing single word questions, content question appeared with copula sentences followed by lexical verbs. Most of them were formed with the question word in-situ. The acquisitional sequence was consistent with the Prominence Hypothesis similarly to the simultaneous bilinguals. However, unlike the error-free acquisition in monolingual and simultaneous bilinguals, John produced errors relating to case particles in his content questions.
Presenters
Satomi KawaguchiAssociate Professor, School of Humanities & Communication Arts, Western Sydney University Junko Iwasaki
Honorary senior lecturer, School of Arts and Humanities, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia, Australia
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
"Acquisition of Content Questions", "", " Child Second Language Development", "", " Japanese L2"
