Nov 25 ====== Paradis:2011 ------------ How do child-internal and child-external factors interact in predicting acquisition of vocabulary and verb morphology by children in English L2? Is maternal education level alone a robust enough metric that we can exclude paternal education? How does this change (if at all) for single-parent households? (both similarities between {single-father/single-mother} vs two-parent-household, and differences between single-father vs single-mother households) Were parents present for these tests? Could that affect the outcome? (recalling in previous studies for this class where mothers were blindfolded to not influence a baby's answer) Paradis look at a lot of factors (external and internal) at once, is it really viable to disentangle singular factors in language acquisition from such a great variety? Do we have studies that try to control variables more closely? Based on the results and on previous works, can we make an assumption about the influence of the prosody/ "rhythm" of L1 on L2 acquisition? If the prosody is similar, is it easier to learn the language? It is said that the frequency of the L2 spoken at home plays a little role in language acquisition and that there will be issues with the morphological acquisition at an older age. If a 10 year old child only has input from school and native-speaker friends due to the family not speaking the L2 at home, could the child achieve a native-like level in the morphological aspect or would the input at home matter more at an older age? The paper gives an overview of 2 studies that contradict each other in some way - "Golberg, Paradis &Crago (2008) found that children who began to learn English as a L2 older than 5;0 accumulated vocabulary faster in English than children who began to learn English younger than 5;0. In contrast, there is less evidence that older age of onset is advantageous for morphological acquisition" - does it mean that language acquisition should be split in the way of learning morphological features apart from learning the language's vocabulary? In the early sections of the article motivation is mentioned as a very important predictor in adult L2 acquisition, however, it is not discussed at all regarding early L2 acquisition. What makes this factor trivial regarding child second language acqusition? Why is there a need to differentiate between language aptitude and cognitive maturity as two child-internal factors? It seems το me that language aptitudes comprises of the relevant cognitive components to language learning and vise versa cognitive maturity reflects all the available cognitive abilities, including the ones related to language learning. The frequency of exposure to the "correct" form of a particular construction is considered vital for the children's output. Such analysis presupposes a "correct" standard variety which is the ultimate goal of acquisition. However, in many cases, immigrant children that have to learn a second language live in communities where non standard varieties prevail (e.g. sociolects). Therefore, a mastery in the constructions of this variety might be regarded as wrong if the standard variety is considered the golden standard. In what terms can we discuss L2 acquisition to avoid prejudice against non standard varieties? The paper explored how child-internal and child-external factors affect L2 acquisition. Is it possible that different children would have a different "most suitable" language, which they find is most easy to learn for them? Is there a specific level of proficiency that a child must have in L1 in order to not experience negative effects on their L1 language from learning a L2 language?