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The aim of this paper is to analyse some aspects of development of Basque as a second language (L2) in children for whom Spanish is their first language (L1) who attended immersion school in Basque in a Spanish-speaking sociolinguistic context. Data consist of oral story retellings produced in a classroom setting where the same children participated at ages 5, 8 and 11. Another group of children for whom Basque was the L1 and who lived in a strong Basque-speaking environment also took part in the study. Two aspects are analysed in the stories: lexical difficulties and the production of text organisers. According to the results, the Basque L2 children seemed to have acquired a linguistic competence quite comparable to L1 capacity: the lexical aspects studied show a clear development in L2, since lexical gaps were frequent at age 5, diminished at age 8 and were practically non-existent at age 11. The production of text organisers also shows a clear developmental pattern and, with increasing age, the children produced a higher variety of text organisers, providing precise temporal links to different segments of the story. It is concluded that Basque immersion seems to foster the development of Basque L2 in contexts where the use of Basque is quite reduced.

The present study explored gender differences in emerging language skills in 13,783 European children from 10 non-English language communities. It was based on a synthesis of published data assessed with adapted versions of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) from age 0.08 to 2.06. The results showed that girls are slightly ahead of boys in early communicative gestures, in productive vocabulary, and in combining words. The difference increased with age. Boys were not found to be more variable than girls. Despite extensive variation in language skills between language communities, the difference between girls and boys remained. This suggests that the difference is caused by robust factors that do not change between language communities. (Contains 3 tables and 4 figures.)

Abstract The aim of this article is to study the development of Basque L2 by Spanish L1 children who attend school in a total immersion programme where Basque is the [...]

Abstract The aim of this article is to analyse the acquisition of object--verb/verb--object word order in Spanish and Basque by monolinguals (L1), early simultaneous bilinguals (2L1) and successive bilinguals, exposed [...]