This study examines the acquisition of the inflectional system by a Turkish child learner of English. Results from longitudinal data collected over 18 months are reported, presenting counterevidence for recent hypotheses on early L2 acquisition according to which missing functional items reflect missing functional categories (e.g., Vainikka & Young-Scholten, 1994, 1996a, 1996b). Despite robust evidence for the early production of copula be, auxiliary be, and overt subjects, the child L2 data analyzed in this paper do not show any evidence for tense and agreement morphology in the early stages of L2 development. In other words, although some functional elements related to IP are missing, the learner is able to perform other morphological and syntactic operations involving the functional projection IP. These findings lead us to question whether the lack of functional elements entails the lack of functional categories.

This study investigates the issue of crosslinguistic influence in the domain of subject realization in Turkish in simultaneous acquisition of Turkish and English. The use of subjects in a null subject language like Turkish is a phenomenon linked to the pragmatics—syntax interface of the grammar and, thus, is a domain where crosslinguistic interference is predicted to occur in bilingual acquisition (Hulk and Müller, 2000; Müller and Hulk, 2001). Spontaneous Turkish data collected from one Turkish—English bilingual child, Ali-John, and one Turkish monolingual child, Murat, are compared. Our results reveal that Ali-John’s production of overt subjects in Turkish is more than that of the control child. These findings could be interpreted as due to crosslinguistic influence from English regarding the suppliance of overt subjects in the context of Turkish—English bilingual acquisition.

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This study examines the status of the functional categories in child second language (L2) acquisition of English. Results from longitudinally collected data are reported, presenting counterevidence for recent hypotheses on early L2 acquisition that assume (1) a structure-building approach according to which the acquisition of functional categories follows an implicational sequence of development of VP-IP-CP (Vainikka and Young-Scholten, 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 1998); and (2) a direct relationship between the acquisition of inflectional morphology and the development of functional categories (Eubank, 1993/94; 1996; Vainikka and Young-Scholten, 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 1998). The child L2 data analysed in this article show that the development of CP is not implicationally contingent on the prior acquisition of IP. The data also suggest that the lack of morphological forms in interlanguage grammars reflects a problem with the realization of surface morphology, rather than an impairment in the domain of functional projections.

This chapter reviews current work on child second language acquisition from a generative perspective. The primary goal is to identify characteristics of child L2 acquisition in relation to child first language (L1) acquisition and adult second language (L2) acquisition and to discuss its contribution to these sister fields both in typical and atypical domains. The chapter is organized into three sections, covering L1 influence in child L2 acquisition, the acquisition of functional architecture in child L2 acquisition, and the issue of morphological variability. Also included in the last section are the relatively new and fast developing areas of research in atypical child L2 acquisition research.