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Research group: Language Development and Developmental Disorders
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How children in the very first years of their lives reach a perfect
competence of the language or languages of their social environment is still an
open question in current research. Do language skills develop on the basis of
genetic determined innate knowledge which represents universal features of
human language? Or does language acquisition, on the contrary, operate in such
a way that children make hypotheses about the structure and function of the
language they are acquiring in order to integrate the structures of the target
language step by step in their own system? The members of this scholar group
seek to give an answer to these fundamental questions on language acquisition
research by investigating early first language acquisition of children
acquiring Basque, Spanish and French. The present research focusses on specific
parts of grammar development such as the case system as well deictic reference.
Unfortunately not every child's social and language growth corresponds to the
standard development. Some developmental disorders such as autism may retard or
hinder the emergence of language, leaving other developmental skills like
musical skills intact. The central question of this very challenging case is
the following: which cognitive barriers may hinder language emergence?
Language development disorders appear not only on impaired children. It is a
well known fact that the learner of a second language encounters many more
problems than a child acquiring his or her first language and he or she never
reaches the degree of competence of a native speaker. One of the studies of
this investigator group aims at describing the barriers that Spanish speaking
adults encounter in learning German as a second language.
(Last change: December 2, 1997)
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