This book presents a comprehensive, state-of-the-art treatment of the acquisition of Indo- and Non-Indo-European languages in various contexts, such as L1, L2, L3/Ln, bi/multilingual, heritage languages, pathology as well as language impairment, and sign language acquisition. The book explores a broad mix of methodologies and issues in contemporary research.

The text presents original research from several different perspectives, and provides a basis for dialogue between researchers working on diverse projects with the aim of furthering our understanding of how languages are acquired. The book proposes and refines new theoretical constructs, e.g. regarding the complexity of linguistic features as a relevant factor forming children's, adults' and bilingual individuals' acquisition of morphological, syntactic, discursive, pragmatic, lexical and phonological structures. It appeals to students, researchers, and professionals in the field.

Discusses the challenge of traditional accounts of language acquisition Presents new thoughts on the acquisition of linguistic phenomena in (Non)-Indo-European languages Includes contributions on how linguistic features are represented in the brain during the acquisition process

Autorentext

Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes is a Professor of Spanish Linguistics at the University of the Balearic Islands and has headed numerous projects on the acquisition of various phenomena in the Spanish language including, but not limited to, the acquisition of ser/estar, tense and mood, and differential object marking, all funded by the British Academy, Art and Humanities Research Council, German Research Foundation, Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, and more recently by the European Union Research Foundation under Horizon 2020. He has authored and co-authored numerous journal articles published in high-impact journal, as well as book chapters and books with leading international publishers. Cristina Suárez-Gómez is a Senior Lecturer of English Linguistics at the University of the Balearic Islands and was the principal investigator of the project "Morphosyntactic variation in New Englishes". She is part of the research group ViEW (Variation in English Worldwide) and a contributor to the Gibraltar component of the International Corpus of English, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (FFI2014-53930-P). Holding a Ph.D. in English from the University of Santiago de Compostela (2004), her main areas of research are English historical syntax, English historical sociolinguistics, dialectal variation in English from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives, and morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes. Her principal publications can be seen at view0.webs.uvigo.es/team/cristinasuarez.

Inhalt
Section I Second-language.- Putnam, Michael T., The role of formal features in an exo-skeletal grammar: Implications for language acquisition and maintenance.- Ahern, Aoife, José Amenós-Pons and Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes, Intepreting evidentiality in non-evidential languages: L2 Spanish by L1 French speakers.- Tuniyan, Elina and Roumyana Slabakova, L2 acquisition of definiteness in English: non-target mapping of anaphoricity onto the ...- Diaubalick, Tim, Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes and Katrin Schmitz, Language influence in the acquisition of aspect: Advanced L2 learners versus heritage speakers.- Genevska-Hanke, Dobrinka, Pronominal use in late L1 attrition in near-native L2 acquisition: the case of pro-drop L1 Bulgarian and non-pro-drop L2 German.- Section II Language acquisition under specific conditions.- Wimmer, Eva, Bernadette Witecy and Martina Penke, Syntactic problems in German individuals with Down syndrome: evidence from the production of wh-questions.- Herbert, Marjorieand Acrisio Pires, Contact signing and English-based production among L1 and L2 deaf ASL-English bilinguals.- Müller, Natascha and Abira Sivakumar-Thiyagarajah, Acquiring three languages from birth: It does matter.- Section III First language.- Ito, Masuyo and Kenneth Wexler, Maximality trouble? Japanese-speaking children's interpretation of comparatives.- Agostinho, Celina and Anna Gavarró, The acquisition of implicit control in European Portuguese.- De Villiers, Jill, Jessica Kotfila, and Tom Roeper, When is recursion easier for children?.- Sicuro Correa, Letícia Maria, On the domain specificity of intervention effects in children's comprehension of relative clauses and coordinate clauses.- Bosch, Jasmijn, Shalom Zuckermann and Manuela Pinto, The acquisition of 'bridging' tested in a coloring task.- Roeper, Tom, Jennifer Rau, Dagmar Bittner, Nadine Balbach, Milena Kuehnast, Presuppositions, implicatures, and repair emerge slowly.- Smeets, Liz and Luisa Meroni, Stress or context for the computation of scalar implicatures.