Early successive bilingualism: Disentangling the relevant factors

Publication Summary

Meisel’s article provides a novel outlook on the much debated issue of age effects in second language acquisition. Presupposing the existence of a critical period, he seeks to delineate the boundary between first (L1) and second (L2) acquisition. More specifically, his goal is to determine “the approximate age range as of which age of acquisition is likely to lead to similarities between the [child] learner’s language and adult L2 acquisition, while distinguishing both from (2)L1” (section 1., paragraph 3). Furthermore, he seeks to establish what the “problem areas” are for L2 children (section 3.2. and section 3.3., paragraph 1). Reviewing data from children who are first exposed to their L2 between the ages of 3 and 5, he observes that development in syntax for this group is relatively unproblematic (p.18), and this holds for a number of target language (TL) properties, including VO/OV, V2 placement, subject-verb agreement and interrogatives (Haznedar 2003, Blom & Polisenskà 2006, Hulk & Cornips 2006a, Rothweiler 2006, Thoma & Tracy 2006, Bonnesen 2007). Meisel concludes that none of these studies “supports the claim that syntactic development in early child L2 learners resembles adult L2 acquisition” (section 3.2., paragraph 4).1 This contrasts, however, with the domain of inflectional morphology (or at least parts thereof), where, according to Meisel, child L2 acquisition does resemble adult L2 acquisition. More specifically, in this domain, Meisel argues, the dividing line between L1 acquisition be that monolingual or bilingual on the one hand, and L2 acquisition be that child or adult on the other, lies around age 4. Meisel’s article raises many interesting issues which would serve as suitable starting points for further research. However, before such re-