Bidirectional Transfer in Korea-Chinese Children’s Language Acquisition

Chinese-English biliteracy acquisition: cross-language and writing system transfer.

This study investigated cross-language and writing system relationship in biliteracy acquisition of children learning to read two different writing systems-Chinese and English. Forty-six Mandarin-speaking children were tested for their first language (Chinese-L1) and second language (English-L2) reading skills. Comparable experiments in Chinese and English were designed focusing on two reading ...

Language acquisition and language change in bidirectional Optimality Theory

Many theories of language assume that the change of a language over time and the acquisition of a language by an individual are interrelated. In this paper we compare and try to relate Mattausch’s (2004) diachronic bidirectional Optimality Theory (bi-OT) account of the development of pronominal binding in English to Hendriks and Spenader’s (2004; 2005/6) synchronic bi-OT account of English-spea...

Chinese Reflexive Ziji in Second Language Acquisition

Morphology-based cross language transfer from Korean to literacy acquisition in English and Chinese

This study examined the nature of morphology-based cross language transfer from Korean to reading and writing acquisition in English and Chinese among Korean-speaking 9th graders who had studied English for seven years and Chinese for one year as foreign languages. One hundred and sixty students were administered a set of comparable Korean (L1), English (L2), and Chinese (L3) tasks tapping into...

Language development and acquisition in children

Language acquisition is a natural developmental process and is unique to Homo sapiens in which a child acquiring his or her mother tongue as a first language.  The simplest theory of language development is that children learn language by imitating adult language. A second possibility is that children acquire language through conditioning. Noam Chomsky put forward innateness hypothesis. Piaget ...