Christina Schelletter

University of Hertfordshire | UH · School of Humanities

Bilingual acquisition research has so far focused on comparisons with monolingual children in terms of linguistic features, performance on standardised tests, input, etc. In contrast, new methodologies, such as eye-tracking, can offer a more detailed understanding of the way bilinguals use both language systems. Eye fixations provide evidence of on...

Input is considered one of the most important factors in the acquisition of lexical and grammatical skills. Input has been found to interact with other factors, such as learner cognitive skills and the circumstances where language is heard. Language learning itself has sometimes been found to enhance cognitive skills. Indeed, intensive contact with...

This study explores parallels and differences in the comprehension of wh -questions and relative clauses between early foreign-language (FL) learners and monolingual children. We test for (a) effects of syntactic first-language (L1) transfer, (b) the impact of input on syntactic development, and (c) the impact of individual differences on early FL...

Drawing together linguists' and psychologists' approaches to the study of bilingualism, this innovative and engaging volume provides students with a firm grounding in bilingual acquisition and development. It begins with a discussion of sequential and simultaneous bilinguals, illustrated by a wealth of case studies and examples, and the key theorie...

Drawing on data from eleven preschools in four European countries (Germany, Belgium, Sweden, and the UK), this edited volume explores the progress of preschool children learning English over a period of two years. In the first volume, children's lexical and grammatical comprehension, the quality of L2 input, the effect of immersion on L1 developmen...

Drawing on data from eleven preschools in four European countries (Germany, Belgium, Sweden, and the UK), this edited volume explores the progress of preschool children learning English over a period of two years. The second edited volume gives details on best practices in bilingual preschools as well as background and training on topics such as se...

Contents Part A: BACKGROUND FOR IMMERSION 1. Preface 2. Why Multilingualism? 3. The Concept of Immersion 3.1 Selection of language and quantity of foreign language input 3.2 Prior knowledge from preschool 3.3 What distinguishes bilingual preschools from bilingual primary schools? 3.4 Selection of subjects 3.5 Literacy training 3.6 Didactic-methodol...

The present study investigates children's syntactic and pragmatic processing when specifying referents presented in short video clips. Within Relevance theory, the assumption of 'optimal relevance' implies that utterances are intended to involve the least processing effort on the part of the listener. In the present context, lexically specified NPs...

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 representa...

In previous work (Sinka & Schelletter 1998) we have addressed the morphosyntactic development of two bilingual children and the issues raised by the opposition between the Single System and the Separate Development hypotheses. Interactions between the two language systems were found to be very rare, consistent with the Separate Development Hypothes...

This volume explores the implications of cross-linguistic structures in simultaneous bilingualism. It aims to find cognitive explanations for the presence or absence of cross-linguistic structures that go beyond the debate of ‘one system or two’. The contributors present syntactic, morphological and phonological features that are found in bilingual...

Study of the acquisition of verb argument structure is an area that has seen considerable growth in recent years, particularly since the appearance of Pinker’s (1989) study of the acquisition of argument structure alternations (see e.g., Brinkman, 1995;Gropen et al., 1989;Gropen et al., 1991;Ingham, 1990,Ingham, 1993/4; Naigles, 1990). In this pape...

Bilingual children provide an opportunity to investigate the role of innate vs. environmental factors in the process of language acquisition. In this paper we examine how far the conversational speech data from two bilingual children shed light on the stage of early grammatical development. We focus on functional categories (FCs, Abney, 1987), beca...

This paper addresses the morphosyntactic development of two bilingual children and the issues raised by the controversy between the single system and the separate development hypotheses. Set within a generative grammar framework, evidence on German/English and Latvian/English is presented from the earliest stages of language development: for the Ge...

It has been proposed that grammatical specific language impairment (SLI) is characterized as a deficit affecting only feature-related aspects of grammar. The research reported here indicates a wider impairment involving aspects of grammar not determined by feature checking, in particular to the structure of the verb phrase (VP) with resultative sec...

The paper investigates children's use of pronouns in two types of unconstrained speech. The first consisted of a conversational setting where all the referents were present in the here-and-now (perceptible), and the second of conversations centred around the child's home and family, such that none of the referents were perceptible (non-perceptible)...

Abstract Narrative has been used in the assessment of children’s language skills for some time but rarely with bilingual children (though see Gutiérrez-Clellen 2002). This paper examines narratives of a sample of German/English bilingual children in terms of standard measures and differences in the children’s retellings of a story. Whereas on the s...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Reading, 1989.