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In this study, we test the prediction, derived from the Critical Period Hypothesis, that a native level in L2 grammar cannot be attained by learners who start acquiring a second language after childhood. We selected 43 very advanced late learners of Dutch (native speakers of German, French and Turkish) and compared their performance on a grammar test with that of 44 native speakers of Dutch. The test consisted of an elicited imitation task and a sentence preference task. In these tasks, participants were tested on their knowledge of dummy subject constructions. These construction types are known to be very hard to acquire for L2-learners of Dutch and are hardly covered in Dutch grammars or L2 Dutch textbooks. The results show that it is possible to attain a native level of proficiency for learners who start acquiring an L2 after puberty, even for learners with a typologically distant L1.

Two picture-word interference experiments investigated whether or not words from a first and more dominant language are activates during lexical access in a foreign and less dominant language. Native speakers of Dutch were instructed to name pictures in English. Revealed that the Dutch name of a picture is activated during initial stages of the process of lexical access to English. (Author/VWL)

Reports on two studies addressing the issue of ultimate attainment of pronunciation by late second-language learners. Findings indicate that it is not impossible to achieve an authentic, nativelike pronunciation of a second language after a specified biological time. The article argues that certain learner characteristics and learning contexts may synergize to override the disadvantages of a late start. (38 references) (Author/CK)

A reanalysis of data drawn by Hartshorne, Tenenbaum, and Pinker (2018) from two‐thirds of a million English speakers showed that their overall conclusion of one sharply defined critical age at 17.4 for all language learners is based on artificial results. We show that instead of a discontinuous exponential learning with sigmoidal decay (ELSD) model, a continuous ELSD model had a better fit when applied separately to monolinguals, bilinguals, and early immersion learners. Only for nonimmersion learners and later immersion learners did a discontinuous ELSD model have a better fit, with a critical age of 18.6 and 19.0 years of age, respectively. These age effects can be interpreted as schooling effects. We suggest that personal and societal factors, including differences in living circumstances and socialization, may bring about age‐specific discontinuity patterns in language learning and in language learning rate. The implication is that they are not the outcome of cognition‐driven developmental factors leading to one or more critical periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some aspects of second language referential communication are analyzed in an experimental setting. The experimental task required subjects, who were visually separated but allowed to converse freely, to reach agreement on the ordering of a set of abstract shapes over a number of trials. (Author/LMO)

Explores similarities and differences in native- and second- language referential communication through review of an experiment in which native Dutch speakers described unconventional abstract shapes first in Dutch and then in English. Subjects exhibited a preference, in both languages, for describing shapes in a holistic rather than segmental perspective. (32 references) (Author/CB)

A study inspired by previous research investigated comprehension of three complex English structures by Dutch high school students at three levels of proficiency. Dutch learners responded similarly to speakers of other languages in an earlier study, but had significantly more ease with one structure familiar in Dutch. (MSE)

In this study, we test the prediction, derived from the Critical Period Hypothesis, that a native level in L2 grammar cannot be attained by learners who start acquiring a second language after childhood. We selected 43 very advanced late learners of Dutch (native speakers of German, French and Turkish) and compared their performance on a grammar test with that of 44 native speakers of Dutch. The test consisted of an elicited imitation task and a sentence preference task. In these tasks, participants were tested on their knowledge of dummy subject constructions. These construction types are known to be very hard to acquire for L2-learners of Dutch and are hardly covered in Dutch grammars or L2 Dutch textbooks. The results show that it is possible to attain a native level of proficiency for learners who start acquiring an L2 after puberty, even for learners with a typologically distant L1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we discuss a relative grammaticality judgement test with dummy subject constructions which we submitted to highly educated native speakers of Dutch. The test contained three types of dummy subject constructions: active sentences with "er" or "0" and a DP-subject and active and passive sentences with "het", "er" or "0" and a sentential subject. For all types there was a general preference pattern and one factor for which this pattern was disturbed. For active sentences with a sentential subject, the general pattern was disturbed when the subject clause was finite and the predicate contained a change of state verb. For many predicates, however, there was a great deal of variation for which no clear-cut explanation could be given. We claim that for dummy subject constructions in Dutch not all the rules are absolute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we test the prediction, derived from the Critical Period Hypothesis, that a native-level of attainment in L2 grammar cannot be reached by learners who start acquiring a second language after the onset of puberty. We selected 30 very advanced German and French late learners (age of arrival less than or equal to 12 years) of Dutch and compared their performance on a grammar test with that of 44 (highly educated) native speakers of Dutch. The test consisted of two tasks: an elicited imitation task and a relative grammaticality judgement task. In these tasks, participants were tested on their knowledge of dummy subject constructions. These construction types were chosen because they are known to be very hard to acquire for learners of Dutch as a second language. The results show that it is possible to attain a native level of proficiency for learners who start acquiring a second language (long) after puberty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports the results of a study undertaken to provide data relevant to the development of a model of bilingual speech production. The data which we used for this purpose are 771 unintentional language switches which occurred in a 35-hour corpus of L2 learner English collected from 45 Dutch learners at 3 different proficiency levels. The occurrence of the language switches turned out to be related to the learners' proficiency in English. This finding is interpreted as support for a spreading activation account of lexical access in bilingual speakers in which the relative frequency of L1 and L2 words in the learner's repertoire plays an important role. We also examined whether our findings could be accommodated with Myers-Scotton's (1992) matrix language frame model for intrasentential code switching and with de Bot's (1992) suggestions to adapt Levelt's (1989) model of speaking for bilingual speech production. In general, this proved to be the case, but the data suggested it was also possible to draw some more specific conclusions. These concerned the storage of inflected word forms in the (bilingual) mental lexicon, the existence of a lexical checking device, and the relationship between lemma access and phonological encoding. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper sets out to explore similarities and differences in L1 and L2 referential communication. Some inadequacies in existing taxonomies of L2 communication strategies are pointed out and an alternative taxonomy is presented in which similar distinctions are proposed to the ones made in studies of L1 referential communication. An account of an experiment is given in which native speakers of Dutch had to describe, first in Dutch and then in English, a set of unconventional abstract shapes which have been used in a long series of studies of L1 referential communication initiated by Krauss and Weinheimer (1964). It is demonstrated that the referential behaviour of the subjects in both task versions can be described in terms of choices between two main strategies: subjects set out to describe the shapes from a holistic or a segmental perspective. In both task versions subjects exhibited a strong preference for holistic perspectives. Differences between the two task versions were mainly quantitative in nature. In particular, subjects needed much more time for the English version than for the Dutch version. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]