Acquisition of L2 English spatial deixes by Arabic-speaking children

Abstract

Deictic words are considered the earliest words which children acquire at the stage of two-word-utterance. However, mastering them like adults may take more time. This paper investigates how L2 children comprehend and produce English spatial deixis ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘this’, and ‘that’ by observing and documenting their responses and reactions in hide-and-seek game. It also aims to find out the children’s obstacles in acquiring these words, such as proximity bias and egocentrism. The subjects are Arabic children of ages four, five, and six who acquire English as a second language in international schools in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. They performed two types of tasks: comprehension task and production task. Both tasks contained two trials: same perspective and the different perspective. Based on the results, children did better in comprehending the spatial deixis than in producing them. Moreover, the results showed that there was no proximity bias happened with children in this study. In addition, the results of the two trials in both tasks illustrated that changing the deictic center improves with age. Although the study provides some significant results, there should be an increase in the number of the samples in order to make the results generalized.

The Role of Universal Grammar in Second Language: English Adjective Phrase by Saudi Learners

“…However, it is impossible to state that there is no access to the UG by relying on Belly-Vorman's (1990) Fundamental Difference Hypothesis, which assumes that there are differences between L1 and L2 but with specific UG effects on both (White, 2000). Bley- Vroman (1990) and Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou (2007) Alothman and Alsager (2022) stated that L2 learners have indirect access to UG in which the L1 knowledge and the UG components that are already activated in the L1 play a significant role in the second language learning process. Also, researchers like Beck (1998) and Morales-Reyes and Gómez Soler (2016) support the idea of having partial access to UG in L2 in which there is access to some individual components such as the learners' L1 knowledge (Han, 2020).…”