The fourth edition of Linguistics has been thoroughly updated and revised to reflect the increasing confluence of linguistics and cognitive science. This is especially evident in the chapter on language acquisition, which now includes sections on the acquisition of morphology, syntax, and pragmatic competence.
Dyslexia in the Foreign Language Classroom (Second Language Acquisition)
This book addresses specific learning difficulties in reading and spelling -- developmental dyslexia. Set in the cross-linguistic context, it presents issues surrounding dyslexia from the perspective of a foreign language teacher. It is intended to serve as a reference book for those involved in foreign language teaching.
Most societies in today's world are multilingual. 'Language contact' occurs when speakers of different languages interact and their languages influence each other. This book is an introduction to the subject, covering individual and societal multilingualism, the acquisition of two or more languages from birth, second language acquisition in adulthood, language change, linguistic typology, language processing and the structure of the language faculty.
Language acquisition is a developmental process. Research on spontaneous processes of both children learning their mother tongue and adults learning a second language has shown that particular stages of acquisition can be discriminated. Initially, learner utterances can be accounted for in terms of a language system that is relatively simple. In studies on second language acquisition this learner system is called the Basic Variety (Klein and Perdue 1997).
The Acquisition of Two Languages from Birth: A Case Study
This book deals with the question of how children exposed to two languages simultaneously from birth learn to speak those two languages. After a critical and comprehensive survey of most of the literature on the subject, the author concludes that empirically well-documented knowledge in this area is very scant indeed. The core of the book concerns a naturalistic study of a Dutch-English bilingual girl around the age of three. The study's main aim is to explore the nature of early bilingual morphosyntactic development.
