The European Union encourages all its citizens to be able to speak two languages in addition to their mother tongue. However, since the content of educational systems is the responsibility of individual member states, promoting multilingualism depends on the language policy of each member state.… read more
Serratrice et al. (2004) propose to extend Hulk & Müller’s (2000, 2001) hypothesis on cross-linguistic influence in early child bilingualism to include cases of influence after instantiation of the C-system (i.e. at a later stage of development). In the present article, we explore whether such an… read more
Possessive constructions in French, Italian and Dutch are similar. Acquisition of these constructions therefore largely follows the same course. The differences between the languages lead to some cross-linguistic phenomena in bilingual first language acquisition. To a large extent, the stages in… read more
Young children often express possession before they have mastered the linguistic means to express this notion in adult forms. In this paper we present evidence on the acquisition of possessive constructions in bilingual children acquiring a Germanic and a Romance language (i.e. Dutch/French and… read more
In this paper, we investigate the development of dislocation structures in three French-Dutch bilingual children. Dislocations are a syntactic means of marking the element that is the topic of an utterance. As such, they constitute the interface between syntax and pragmatics, a domain that has been… read more
This paper describes an investigation into the relation between the results of a newly developed test of deep word knowledge (DWK) and a series of other word knowledge tests as well as a writing task. The DWK consists of 63 items constructed along the following model: one stimulus plus 6 responses. read more
In this paper, we argue that variation in child bilingualism has received too little attention. The literature on monolingual acquisition shows that children vary in the routes they follow towards linguistic proficiency: children have preferences for the acquisition of certain word classes (Nelson… read more
In this article, we report on the construction of a test of deep word knowledge in French as a second language that can be used at advanced levels of proficiency. By 'deep word knowledge' we mean the knowledge of the semantic network of L2-words; our test focuses on the knowledge of the relations… read more
In the literature about fossilization, several definitions have been given and several explanations have been suggested for this phenomenon. I see fossilization as a long-time stagnation in the T2 learning process, leading to errors based on transfer. Fossilization is caused by sociolinguistic,… read more
Child bilingualism has been a domain of growing interest in the last few years. A central question in research concerns the differentiation of the two languages in the developmen-tal process: do children develop two separate language systems from the very beginning or do they start with a combined… read more
In this article we address the question whether polysemous words are more difficult to translate than monosemous words. If the two different meanings of a polysemous word have to be translated by two different words in the target language, the translator wil have to select the right one. We… read more
One of the most important questions that has to be answered before we can start developing courseware for computer assisted language learning concerns the role feedback could or should play in this type of courseware. This question is the more important because in the last few years two tendencies… read more
The accessibility of lexical information stored on computers is not only important for the human computer user, but also for programs that process natural language. The requirements with respect to the content and structure of a computer dictionary are different than for a printed dictionary and… read more
Teacher training institutes in the Netherlands submit to their students tests of grammaticality judgments concerning FL sentences, in order to prepare them for their future task. Comparison of the results of these tests with results of FL production tests of the same students suggested that the… read more
Teacher training institutes in the Netherlands submit to their students tests of grammaticality judgments concerning FL senten-ces, in order to prepare them for their future task. Comparison of the results of these tests with results of FL production tests of the same students suggested that the… read more
In this article I try to show that the relationship between grammar teaching and grammar learning is not as close as one often assumes on intuitional grounds. My arguments are based on research at the University of Amsterdam. They are of a psychological, didactic and psycholinguistic nature. In the… read more