The Acquisition of Spatial Relations in a Second Language

This book is the third to appear in the SIBIL series based on results from the European Science Foundation's Additional Activity on the second language acquisition of adult immigrants. It analyses from a longitudinal and cross-linguistic perspective the acquisition of the linguistic means to express spatial relations in the target languages English, French and German.

The book is concerned with the acquisition of English phonology, both segmental and supra segmental, by learners of English as a second language, as a third language and by speakers of a post colonial ("new") variety of English. It focuses on the acquisition process and factors influencing it, based on insights from all three disciplines.

Acquiring Pragmatics offers a comprehensive synthesis of state-of-the-art research on the acquisition of pragmatics. It introduces the current topics of research in theoretical pragmatics and explores the issues they raise for language acquisition research and the new experimental designs which have been developed to address them.

Any theory of phonology must be able to account for the acquisition and development of a phonological system, and studying acquisition often leads to reciprocal advances in the theory. This volume explores the link between phonological theory and linguistic development from a variety of angles, including phonological representation, individual differences, and cross-linguistic approaches. Chapters touch on the full spectrum of phonological development, from childhood to adult second-language learning, and from developing dialects to language death.

This volume corrects the relative neglect in Second Language Acquisition studies of the quantitative study of language variation and provides insights into such issues as language transfer, acquisition through exposure, language universals, learner’s age and so forth.
These studies bolster the idea that a full account of SLA development (and, hence, a “theory of SLA”) must be built on not only detailed accounts of interlanguage data but also on a wide appeal to factors which govern the psycholinguistic bases of SLA.