A New Perspective on the Creative Construction Process in Child Second Language Acquisition. Working Papers on Bilingualism, No. 4.

Previous work by the authors permitted them to hypothesize the existence of certain universal cognitive strategies that play a significant role in child second language acquisition. Forming the basis of the "creative construction process" in L2 learning, these strategies have heretofore remained unspecified. This paper offers new perspectives on the specific nature of the creative construction process: first, by an attempt to use Brown's notions of semantic and linguistic complexity to account for differences between first and second language acquisition; second, by a clarification of the notions of "learning complexity" and "learning strategy"; and finally, by presenting a new analytical procedure and framework which may be useful in research on children's strategies in acquiring L2 syntax. This new procedure involves an adaptation of Bart and Krus'"Ordering- Theoretic Method," which assumes that there is a logical relationship among items in a group, and which is designed to determine those relationships. The ultimate value of this type of analysis lies in its potential to uncover the sorts of empirical facts needed before one can begin to specify with any confidence the nature of language acquisition strategies. (Author/DB)