Bücher der Reihe Studies on Language Acquisition

Counterfactual thinking is a universal cognitive process in which reality is compared to an imagined view of what might have been. This type of reasoning is at the center of daily operations, as decision-making, risk preventability or blame assignment. More generally, non-factual scenarios have been defined as a crucial ingredient of desire and modern love. If the areas covered by this reasoning are so varied, the L2 learner will be led to express 'what might have been' at some point of her acquisitional itinerary. How is this reasoning expressed in French, Spanish and Italian? By the use of what lexical, syntactic and grammatical devices? Will the learner combine these devices as the native French speakers do? What are the L1 features likely to fossilize in the L2 grammar? What are the information principles governing a communicative task based on the production of counterfactual scenarios? These are some of the questions addressed by the present volume.

Children who grow up as second- or third-generation immigrants typically acquire and speak the minority language at home and the majority language at school. Recurrently, these children have been the subject of controversial debates about their linguistic abilities in relation to their educational success. However, such debates fail to recognise that variation in bilinguals' language processing is a phenomenon in its own right that results from the dynamic influence of one language on another. This volume provides insight into cross-linguistic influence in Turkish-German and Turkish-French bilingual children and uncovers the nature of variation in L1 and L2 oral motion event descriptions by evaluating the impact of language-specific patterns and language dominance.The results indicate that next to typological differences between the speakers' L1 and L2, language dominance has an impact on the type and direction of influence. However, the author argues that most variation can be explained by L1/L2 usage preferences. Bilinguals make frequent use of patterns that exist in both languages, but are unequally preferred by monolingual speakers. This finding underlines the importance of usage-based approaches in SLA.

The Spanish language is spoken by an estimated 477 million people worldwide. This volume focuses on the contact between Spanish and other language varieties, including Catalan, Portuguese and Galician in the Spanish Peninsula. The book explores the characteristics of such language contact situations from structural, developmental, societal and cognitive perspectives.

Acquisition of the native language proceeds in a stage-wise manner for both typically developing (TD) children and children with developmental language disorder (DLD). As shown in TD children learning Dutch and German, the ability to establish contextual cohesion serves as the driving force to proceed from a simple, lexical system to a more complex, functional system. It is argued that precisely this ability is challenged in children with DLD. The present book offers an account of the functional linguistic features fit to achieve contextual cohesion in language production. It provides a rationale for practitioners to develop linguistically founded tools to be used in speech therapy.