On Becoming a Speaker of an SVO Language and Its Non-Typology-Specific Effect

Abstract

Studies of second language acquisition in young children have noted the rapidity with which a second language is acquired. While extra-linguistic factors undoubtedly contribute to this rapidity, the type of linguistic knowledge made available by the level of development attained in the first language is presumably also of decisive influence. This paper examines age-related aspects of second language speech in young French-speaking children. It is proposed that young children below the age of 3-4 still approach L2 learning with a grammar in which the pragmatic component is predominant. Children 4 years of age and older have available for transfer to the L2 acquisition task a grammar with an autonomous syntactic component. This grammar generates subject - predicate structures in which the occurrence of sentence categories like subject and object is no longer conditioned by discourse constraints .