Christina Schelletter | University of Hertfordshire (original) (raw)
Papers by Christina Schelletter
Christina Schelletter, ‘Lexikalische Entwicklung von bilingualen Vorschulkindern’, in Anja Steinl... more Christina Schelletter, ‘Lexikalische Entwicklung von bilingualen Vorschulkindern’, in Anja Steinlen, Thorsten Piske, eds., Wortschatzlernen in bilingualen Schulen und Kindertagesstaetten, (Frankfurt: Peter Lang GmbH, 2016), ISBN 978-3631656488, eISBN 978-3-653-04973-2, DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-04973-2.
Christina Schelletter and Anja Steilen,’Bilingual Kindergarten: The influence of second language ... more Christina Schelletter and Anja Steilen,’Bilingual Kindergarten: The influence of second language acquisition English on the first language acquisition, German for children in pre-school age’, in Anja Steinlen and Thorsten Piske, eds., Bilinguale Programme in Kindertageseinrichtungen: Umsetzungsbeispiele und Forschungsergebnisse, (Tubingen: Narr, 2016), ISBN: 978-3-8233-6902-8, e-ISBN: 2197-6384
Bilingual children's early lexical development so far has been part of the ongoing debate wh... more Bilingual children's early lexical development so far has been part of the ongoing debate whether children start out with one system (Volterra & Taeschner 1978) or whether they develop two separate systems from early on (De Houwer 1990, Meisel 1994). In relation to bilingual children's
In previous work (Sinka & Schelletter 1998), we have addressed the morphosyntactic development of... more 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 Hypothesis. This is further underlined by the developmental lead-lag pattern evidenced in the emergence of Functional Categories (Schelletter, Sinka & Garman 1999, Garman, Schelletter & Sinka 1999). More recently (Sinka, Garman & Schelletter 2000), we have supplemented our investigation of early grammatical development by using a lexical profiling approach to focus on the evidence from the acquisition of main verbs. Results suggest that the lead-lag order of development for the two languages in each child is the same as for the grammatical system, and each bilingual child appears to be developing the system of main verbs independently for each language, although there are some commonalities across languages, e.g. in the development of the verb 'to be'. In this paper we extend the lexical profiling approach to the analysis of noun vocabulary. We look at the general characteristics of types and tokens, and then consider more fine-grained analysis of the nouns used by each child in terms of grammatico-semantic categories. The findings will be discussed in relation to the Separate Development Hypothesis.
International Journal of Bilingualism, 1998
This paper addresses the morphosyntactic development of two bilingual children and the issues rai... more 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 German/English child from 2;0 to 2;6, for the Latvian/English child from 1;3 to 1;11. For the German/English data, the results show early word order patterns which are in line with the language-specific orders of both languages. In the Latvian/English data, there is correct inflectional marking on nouns and verbs in Latvian from the earliest stages, contrary to the paucity of such marking in English. Hence the evidence from both children supports the view that the bilingual child separates the two languages from the beginning (Separate Development Hypothesis). In addition, the data show a developmental lead-lag pattern whereby functional cat...
New Directions In Language Development And Disorders, 2000
Study of the acquisition of verb argument structure is an area that has seen considerable growth ... more 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 paper we wish to investigate a relatively less studied aspect of argument structure in children’s language. Although some light has been cast on constraints that underlie argument structure alternations, and the lexical representations involved in argument structure alternations that can be ascribed to children, not much is known about how argument structure typically develops in use between the pre-school and early school years, and whether certain argument structure realisations are more typical of certain stages of development than others. Our intention in this paper is to investigate this issue, focusing on a few of the better studied argument structure types, especially those involving what can loosely be called location events, in which an entity moves or is moved to another location.
New Directions In Language Development And Disorders, 2000
Bilingual children provide an opportunity to investigate the role of innate vs. environmental fac... more 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), because these are subject to striking developmental and cross-linguistic variation: in terms of the principles and parameters model of Universal Grammar (Chomsky, 1986; Hyams, 1986; Freidin, 1992; Meisel, 1995), they are highly parameterised. Within this framework, the main developmental issue has been stated as between the continuity and maturation hypotheses. By the continuity view (Pinker, 1984), all UG principles are available from the outset and minimal exposure to the primary linguistic data is required for parameters to be set. By contrast the maturational view (Borer & Wexler, 1987; Radford, 1995) allows for certain linguistic principles to form over time, with the implication that exposure to primary linguistic data is effective only once a maturational threshold has been reached.
First Language, 1991
Previous research on sentence comprehension conducted with German-learning children has concentra... more Previous research on sentence comprehension conducted with German-learning children has concentrated on the role of case marking and word order in typically developing children. This paper compares the performance of German-learning children with language impairment (age 4-6 years) and without language impairment (aged 2-6, 8-9 years) in two experiments that systematically vary the cues animacy, case marking, word order, and subject-verb agreement. The two experiments differ with regard to the choice of case marking: in the first it is distinct but in the second it is neutralized. The theoretical framework is the competition model developed by Bates and MacWhinney and their collaborators, a variant of the parallel distributed processing models. It is hypothesized that children of either population first appreciate the cue animacy that can be processed locally, that is, ''on the spot,'' before they turn to more distributed cues leading ultimately up to subject-verb agreement, which presupposes the comparison of various constituents before an interpretation can be established. Thus agreement is more ''costly'' in processing than animacy or the (more) local cue initial NP. In experiment I with unambiguous case markers it is shown that the typically developing children proceed from animacy to the nominative (predominantly in coalition with the initial NP) to agreement, while in the second experiment with ambiguous case markers these children turn from animacy to the initial NP and then to agreement. The impaired children also progress from local to distributed cues. Yet, in contrast to the control group, they do not acknowledge the nominative in coalition with the initial NP in the first experiment but only in support of agreement. However, although they do not seem to appreciate distinct case markers to any large extent in the first experiment, they are irritated if such distinctions are lacking: in experiment II all impaired children turn to animacy (some in coalition with the initial NP and/or particular word orders). In the discussion, the relationship between short-term memory and processing as
First Language, 1986
... PAUL FLETCHER, MIKE GARMAN, MICHAEL JOHNSON, CHRISTINA SCHELLETTER & LOUISETTE STODEL, Un... more ... PAUL FLETCHER, MIKE GARMAN, MICHAEL JOHNSON, CHRISTINA SCHELLETTER & LOUISETTE STODEL, University of Reading ... TINA HICKEY, University of Reading The naturalness argument advanced in different forms by Jesperson, Bruner, McNeill and Osgood ...
Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 2003
The present study investigates children"s syntactic and pragmatic processing when specifying refe... more 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 are assumed to be more in line with optimal relevance than pronouns. Subjects were 48 normally developing children aged 3;4-8;10 and 30 SLI children aged 5;1-8;9, divided into a low and a normal MLU group. Children's responses were coded according to levels of pragmatic processing and syntactic positions. Normally developing children' referent specifications were found to be increasingly relevant with increasing age. Differences between SLI and normal children were only found for the low MLU group with SLI who used fewer pronouns than the younger children, thereby showing that syntactic limitations alone cannot account for children's specification of referents.
Academic Exchange Quarterly, 2004
Proceedings of the first …, 1999
The present study investigates children\u27s syntactic and pragmatic processing when specifying r... more The present study investigates children\u27s syntactic and pragmatic processing when specifying referents presented in short video clips. Within Relevance theory, the assumption of \u27optimal relevance\u27 implies that utterances are intended to involve the least processing effort on the part of the listener. In the present context, lexically specified NPs are assumed to be more in line with optimal relevance than pronouns. Subjects were 48 normally developing children aged 3;4-8;10 and 30 SLI children aged 5;1-8;9, divided into a low and a normal MLU group. Children\u27s responses were coded according to levels of pragmatic processing and syntactic positions. Normally developing children\u27s referent specifications were found to be increasingly relevant with increasing age. Differences between SLI and normal children were only found for the low MLU group with SLI who used fewer pronouns than the younger children, thereby showing that syntactic limitations alone cannot account for...
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2002
Previous studies of adult bilinguals have shown that cognates (translation equivalents similar in... more 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 representations are similar to those of adults, effects of form similarity between words should also be observed. This paper examines form-similar nouns in the early lexical development of a bilingual German/English child aged 1;11–2;9 as well as effects of form similarity in picture naming and translation in two groups of German/English children aged 8–9. Form similarity here differs from the cognate status of a word in that it implies similarity of sound only. Considering the way hearing children acquire words, it seemed necessary to restrict the similarity of words to this modality. Similarly, the presentation of items in the translation task...
The terms 'second language' and 'foreign language' are used interchangeably throughout the book. ... more The terms 'second language' and 'foreign language' are used interchangeably throughout the book. 3 Due to the vast differences in preschool terminology throughout Europe, educators and other pedagogical staff in the preschools is referred to as 'preschool teachers,' independent of the pedagogical approach used in the respective institution. Kristin Kersten et al. tools were available on the market. Thus, an observation checklist for the input of the L2 teachers, a score for the intensity of the L2 input, a comprehension test for grammatical phenomena, a field guide for the observation of intercultural encounters, and an observation tool for green immersion were developed by the research group. They represent an innovation to systematic data elicitation at preschool level. Volume I presents the results of the different research studies in detail. It has a strong theoretical and empirical focus and is aimed at the research community in the fields of first and second language acquisition, intercultural communication, environmental education and foreign language teaching. The volume begins with a study on the L2 teachers' input and its relation to the results of the test results by Martina Weitz and her team. The data were elicited with a newly developed ELIAS observation tool, the IQOS (Input Quality Observation Scheme). In the following four chapters, the results of the language studies are presented, starting with Andreas Rohde's paper on L2 lexical comprehension based on the standardised and readily available BPVS II (British Picture Vocabulary Scale II), and Steinlen et al.'s paper on the comprehension of L2 grammatical phenomena based on the ELIAS L2 grammar comprehension test. Christina Schelletter & Rachel Ramsey's chapter includes comparison data of monolingual and bilingual speakers in England on both comprehension tests. Steinlen et al. then go on to describe the children's first language acquisition in the German project preschools, which is based on the standardised SETK test. Kersten et al. introduce a new angle to the preschool studies, describing the intercultural encounters observed in bilingual preschools between children of various cultural backgrounds, and between children and their non-native teachers who provide the L2 input in each programme. This paper develops categories of ICC observation, which present a new step in the research on intercultural behaviour of very young children. The following two chapters by Shannon Thomas and Inge Strunz & Shannon Thomas focus on research in the zoo preschool. Thomas identifies stages of development in the L2 encounters with nature and animals while Strunz & Thomas include the perspective of parents and teachers on the reactions of the children at the zoo preschool. Volume I concludes with a presentation of the profiles of each project preschool. Insa Wipperman & Christine Tiefenthal take various factors into account which constitute the unique structure of each programme and which help understand the multifaceted nature of preschools that the research studies were faced with. This final chapter may serve as a detailed reference point for the data presented in the preceding sections. Volume II, on the other hand, contains a description of best practices in various different bilingual preschool programmes as well as background information on important preschool-related topics, which was derived from teacher training units developed in the ELIAS framework. It is of interest for practitioners, teachers and other educational staff, parents, politicians and researchers alike. The volume starts out with Henning Wode's introduction to bilingual preschools on the European level, which gives an example of a successful model of bilingual immersion education from preschool to high school in Kiel, Germany. The second chapter summarises the most important research
Applied Psycholinguistics, 2019
This study explores parallels and differences in the comprehension of wh-questions and relative c... more 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 syntactic development. We compare the results to findings in child second language (L2) naturalistic acquisition and adult FL acquisition. Following work on adult FL acquisition, we carried out a picture-based interpretation task with 243 child FL learners in fourth grade at different regular, partial, and high-immersion schools in Germany plus 68 monolingual English children aged 5 to 8 years as controls. The child FL learners display a strong subject-first preference but do not appear to use the L1 syntax in comprehension. Input differences across different schools affect overall accuracy, with students at high-immersion FL schools catchi...
The study investigates L1 development in a group of German children learning English and a group ... more The study investigates L1 development in a group of German children learning English and a group of German/English bilingual children. Both groups attend bilingual nursery schools. All children completed a language development test for children aged 3–5. The results are compared to the children’s level of English comprehension.Non peer reviewe
Christina Schelletter, ‘Lexikalische Entwicklung von bilingualen Vorschulkindern’, in Anja Steinl... more Christina Schelletter, ‘Lexikalische Entwicklung von bilingualen Vorschulkindern’, in Anja Steinlen, Thorsten Piske, eds., Wortschatzlernen in bilingualen Schulen und Kindertagesstaetten, (Frankfurt: Peter Lang GmbH, 2016), ISBN 978-3631656488, eISBN 978-3-653-04973-2, DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-04973-2.
Christina Schelletter and Anja Steilen,’Bilingual Kindergarten: The influence of second language ... more Christina Schelletter and Anja Steilen,’Bilingual Kindergarten: The influence of second language acquisition English on the first language acquisition, German for children in pre-school age’, in Anja Steinlen and Thorsten Piske, eds., Bilinguale Programme in Kindertageseinrichtungen: Umsetzungsbeispiele und Forschungsergebnisse, (Tubingen: Narr, 2016), ISBN: 978-3-8233-6902-8, e-ISBN: 2197-6384
Bilingual children's early lexical development so far has been part of the ongoing debate wh... more Bilingual children's early lexical development so far has been part of the ongoing debate whether children start out with one system (Volterra & Taeschner 1978) or whether they develop two separate systems from early on (De Houwer 1990, Meisel 1994). In relation to bilingual children's
In previous work (Sinka & Schelletter 1998), we have addressed the morphosyntactic development of... more 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 Hypothesis. This is further underlined by the developmental lead-lag pattern evidenced in the emergence of Functional Categories (Schelletter, Sinka & Garman 1999, Garman, Schelletter & Sinka 1999). More recently (Sinka, Garman & Schelletter 2000), we have supplemented our investigation of early grammatical development by using a lexical profiling approach to focus on the evidence from the acquisition of main verbs. Results suggest that the lead-lag order of development for the two languages in each child is the same as for the grammatical system, and each bilingual child appears to be developing the system of main verbs independently for each language, although there are some commonalities across languages, e.g. in the development of the verb 'to be'. In this paper we extend the lexical profiling approach to the analysis of noun vocabulary. We look at the general characteristics of types and tokens, and then consider more fine-grained analysis of the nouns used by each child in terms of grammatico-semantic categories. The findings will be discussed in relation to the Separate Development Hypothesis.
International Journal of Bilingualism, 1998
This paper addresses the morphosyntactic development of two bilingual children and the issues rai... more 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 German/English child from 2;0 to 2;6, for the Latvian/English child from 1;3 to 1;11. For the German/English data, the results show early word order patterns which are in line with the language-specific orders of both languages. In the Latvian/English data, there is correct inflectional marking on nouns and verbs in Latvian from the earliest stages, contrary to the paucity of such marking in English. Hence the evidence from both children supports the view that the bilingual child separates the two languages from the beginning (Separate Development Hypothesis). In addition, the data show a developmental lead-lag pattern whereby functional cat...
New Directions In Language Development And Disorders, 2000
Study of the acquisition of verb argument structure is an area that has seen considerable growth ... more 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 paper we wish to investigate a relatively less studied aspect of argument structure in children’s language. Although some light has been cast on constraints that underlie argument structure alternations, and the lexical representations involved in argument structure alternations that can be ascribed to children, not much is known about how argument structure typically develops in use between the pre-school and early school years, and whether certain argument structure realisations are more typical of certain stages of development than others. Our intention in this paper is to investigate this issue, focusing on a few of the better studied argument structure types, especially those involving what can loosely be called location events, in which an entity moves or is moved to another location.
New Directions In Language Development And Disorders, 2000
Bilingual children provide an opportunity to investigate the role of innate vs. environmental fac... more 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), because these are subject to striking developmental and cross-linguistic variation: in terms of the principles and parameters model of Universal Grammar (Chomsky, 1986; Hyams, 1986; Freidin, 1992; Meisel, 1995), they are highly parameterised. Within this framework, the main developmental issue has been stated as between the continuity and maturation hypotheses. By the continuity view (Pinker, 1984), all UG principles are available from the outset and minimal exposure to the primary linguistic data is required for parameters to be set. By contrast the maturational view (Borer & Wexler, 1987; Radford, 1995) allows for certain linguistic principles to form over time, with the implication that exposure to primary linguistic data is effective only once a maturational threshold has been reached.
First Language, 1991
Previous research on sentence comprehension conducted with German-learning children has concentra... more Previous research on sentence comprehension conducted with German-learning children has concentrated on the role of case marking and word order in typically developing children. This paper compares the performance of German-learning children with language impairment (age 4-6 years) and without language impairment (aged 2-6, 8-9 years) in two experiments that systematically vary the cues animacy, case marking, word order, and subject-verb agreement. The two experiments differ with regard to the choice of case marking: in the first it is distinct but in the second it is neutralized. The theoretical framework is the competition model developed by Bates and MacWhinney and their collaborators, a variant of the parallel distributed processing models. It is hypothesized that children of either population first appreciate the cue animacy that can be processed locally, that is, ''on the spot,'' before they turn to more distributed cues leading ultimately up to subject-verb agreement, which presupposes the comparison of various constituents before an interpretation can be established. Thus agreement is more ''costly'' in processing than animacy or the (more) local cue initial NP. In experiment I with unambiguous case markers it is shown that the typically developing children proceed from animacy to the nominative (predominantly in coalition with the initial NP) to agreement, while in the second experiment with ambiguous case markers these children turn from animacy to the initial NP and then to agreement. The impaired children also progress from local to distributed cues. Yet, in contrast to the control group, they do not acknowledge the nominative in coalition with the initial NP in the first experiment but only in support of agreement. However, although they do not seem to appreciate distinct case markers to any large extent in the first experiment, they are irritated if such distinctions are lacking: in experiment II all impaired children turn to animacy (some in coalition with the initial NP and/or particular word orders). In the discussion, the relationship between short-term memory and processing as
First Language, 1986
... PAUL FLETCHER, MIKE GARMAN, MICHAEL JOHNSON, CHRISTINA SCHELLETTER & LOUISETTE STODEL, Un... more ... PAUL FLETCHER, MIKE GARMAN, MICHAEL JOHNSON, CHRISTINA SCHELLETTER & LOUISETTE STODEL, University of Reading ... TINA HICKEY, University of Reading The naturalness argument advanced in different forms by Jesperson, Bruner, McNeill and Osgood ...
Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 2003
The present study investigates children"s syntactic and pragmatic processing when specifying refe... more 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 are assumed to be more in line with optimal relevance than pronouns. Subjects were 48 normally developing children aged 3;4-8;10 and 30 SLI children aged 5;1-8;9, divided into a low and a normal MLU group. Children's responses were coded according to levels of pragmatic processing and syntactic positions. Normally developing children' referent specifications were found to be increasingly relevant with increasing age. Differences between SLI and normal children were only found for the low MLU group with SLI who used fewer pronouns than the younger children, thereby showing that syntactic limitations alone cannot account for children's specification of referents.
Academic Exchange Quarterly, 2004
Proceedings of the first …, 1999
The present study investigates children\u27s syntactic and pragmatic processing when specifying r... more The present study investigates children\u27s syntactic and pragmatic processing when specifying referents presented in short video clips. Within Relevance theory, the assumption of \u27optimal relevance\u27 implies that utterances are intended to involve the least processing effort on the part of the listener. In the present context, lexically specified NPs are assumed to be more in line with optimal relevance than pronouns. Subjects were 48 normally developing children aged 3;4-8;10 and 30 SLI children aged 5;1-8;9, divided into a low and a normal MLU group. Children\u27s responses were coded according to levels of pragmatic processing and syntactic positions. Normally developing children\u27s referent specifications were found to be increasingly relevant with increasing age. Differences between SLI and normal children were only found for the low MLU group with SLI who used fewer pronouns than the younger children, thereby showing that syntactic limitations alone cannot account for...
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2002
Previous studies of adult bilinguals have shown that cognates (translation equivalents similar in... more 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 representations are similar to those of adults, effects of form similarity between words should also be observed. This paper examines form-similar nouns in the early lexical development of a bilingual German/English child aged 1;11–2;9 as well as effects of form similarity in picture naming and translation in two groups of German/English children aged 8–9. Form similarity here differs from the cognate status of a word in that it implies similarity of sound only. Considering the way hearing children acquire words, it seemed necessary to restrict the similarity of words to this modality. Similarly, the presentation of items in the translation task...
The terms 'second language' and 'foreign language' are used interchangeably throughout the book. ... more The terms 'second language' and 'foreign language' are used interchangeably throughout the book. 3 Due to the vast differences in preschool terminology throughout Europe, educators and other pedagogical staff in the preschools is referred to as 'preschool teachers,' independent of the pedagogical approach used in the respective institution. Kristin Kersten et al. tools were available on the market. Thus, an observation checklist for the input of the L2 teachers, a score for the intensity of the L2 input, a comprehension test for grammatical phenomena, a field guide for the observation of intercultural encounters, and an observation tool for green immersion were developed by the research group. They represent an innovation to systematic data elicitation at preschool level. Volume I presents the results of the different research studies in detail. It has a strong theoretical and empirical focus and is aimed at the research community in the fields of first and second language acquisition, intercultural communication, environmental education and foreign language teaching. The volume begins with a study on the L2 teachers' input and its relation to the results of the test results by Martina Weitz and her team. The data were elicited with a newly developed ELIAS observation tool, the IQOS (Input Quality Observation Scheme). In the following four chapters, the results of the language studies are presented, starting with Andreas Rohde's paper on L2 lexical comprehension based on the standardised and readily available BPVS II (British Picture Vocabulary Scale II), and Steinlen et al.'s paper on the comprehension of L2 grammatical phenomena based on the ELIAS L2 grammar comprehension test. Christina Schelletter & Rachel Ramsey's chapter includes comparison data of monolingual and bilingual speakers in England on both comprehension tests. Steinlen et al. then go on to describe the children's first language acquisition in the German project preschools, which is based on the standardised SETK test. Kersten et al. introduce a new angle to the preschool studies, describing the intercultural encounters observed in bilingual preschools between children of various cultural backgrounds, and between children and their non-native teachers who provide the L2 input in each programme. This paper develops categories of ICC observation, which present a new step in the research on intercultural behaviour of very young children. The following two chapters by Shannon Thomas and Inge Strunz & Shannon Thomas focus on research in the zoo preschool. Thomas identifies stages of development in the L2 encounters with nature and animals while Strunz & Thomas include the perspective of parents and teachers on the reactions of the children at the zoo preschool. Volume I concludes with a presentation of the profiles of each project preschool. Insa Wipperman & Christine Tiefenthal take various factors into account which constitute the unique structure of each programme and which help understand the multifaceted nature of preschools that the research studies were faced with. This final chapter may serve as a detailed reference point for the data presented in the preceding sections. Volume II, on the other hand, contains a description of best practices in various different bilingual preschool programmes as well as background information on important preschool-related topics, which was derived from teacher training units developed in the ELIAS framework. It is of interest for practitioners, teachers and other educational staff, parents, politicians and researchers alike. The volume starts out with Henning Wode's introduction to bilingual preschools on the European level, which gives an example of a successful model of bilingual immersion education from preschool to high school in Kiel, Germany. The second chapter summarises the most important research
Applied Psycholinguistics, 2019
This study explores parallels and differences in the comprehension of wh-questions and relative c... more 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 syntactic development. We compare the results to findings in child second language (L2) naturalistic acquisition and adult FL acquisition. Following work on adult FL acquisition, we carried out a picture-based interpretation task with 243 child FL learners in fourth grade at different regular, partial, and high-immersion schools in Germany plus 68 monolingual English children aged 5 to 8 years as controls. The child FL learners display a strong subject-first preference but do not appear to use the L1 syntax in comprehension. Input differences across different schools affect overall accuracy, with students at high-immersion FL schools catchi...
The study investigates L1 development in a group of German children learning English and a group ... more The study investigates L1 development in a group of German children learning English and a group of German/English bilingual children. Both groups attend bilingual nursery schools. All children completed a language development test for children aged 3–5. The results are compared to the children’s level of English comprehension.Non peer reviewe