Deutsch als Zweitsprache - Theorie und Didaktik des Zweitspracherwerbs                                 

chairs by Angela Grimm & Anja Müller

It is a widely held assumption that children develop receptive skills before productive ones. For example, 16 months-old children produce 45 words but understand approximately 180 words (Fenson et al., 1993 for English). Several recent studies, however, provide evidence that preschool children use structures in a target-like way without assigning them an adult-like interpretation (such as focus particles, anaphora, complementizers, or contrast accent). At first glance, these latter findings are surprising, because target-like production requires mastery of the relevant grammatical structure.Taken together, both sets of findings suggest that language is acquired within a circle where comprehension precedes production and production precedes comprehension. Moreover, these results call for a reconsideration of the notions „comprehension‟ and „production‟ in language acquisition research. In our workshop, we aim to (re)consider the comprehension-production asymmetries in child language from theoretical and methodological perspectives. We would focus on comprehension because it is central for both comprehension (e.g., true value judgements) and production tasks (e.g., sentence completion). Questions related to the topic of the workshop are for example:

• Is there further evidence for or against a comprehension-production-asymmetry?
• Which theoretical models can account for the empirical findings?
• Could the earlier mastery of comprehension skills be an artefact of research methods?
• How can „comprehension‟ and „production‟ be redefined to capture the observed symmetries?

We invite contributions investigating monolingual, bilingual, and impaired language development, and we explicitly welcome research comparing comprehension and production skills in the same subjects. As the workshop aims at bringing together re-searchers from experimental and theoretical linguistics, we particularly welcome contributions that build a bridge between empirical findings and linguistic theory.

chairs by Cornelia Hamann & Esther Ruigendijk

20 years ago it was found that the interpretation of pronouns is problematic for youngchildren, an observation named the DPBE (Delay of Principle B Effect). Prominent explanations for this effect involved pragmatic or processing factors (Chien and Wexler 1990, Grodzinsky and Reinhart 1993). Later cross-linguistic differences emerged, namely that children from Romance languages understand simple sentences with clitic pronouns from early on, but show the DPBE in complex constructions such as ECM-clauses. Accounts for the ECM-effect (also found in Dutch or English) usually involve chain formation /reconstruction whereas the better performance of Romance children is attributed to the non-deictic or deficient nature of clitics.

To further complicate matters, it turned out that there is no DPBE in Greek or German even though there is a strong and a weak/clitic paradigm (Varlakosta 2000, Ruigendijk et al 2007), suggesting that the mere existence of clitics (or higher positions) in a language influences the DPBE. In addition, differences across populations and tasks have also emerged (Grodzinsky 2005, Ruigendijk et al. 2006). Influenced by the acquisition results, binding has not ceased to be of interest on the theoretical level, see work by Heim and Reinhart, but also more recently

Reuland and Everaert (2001), di Scullio and Aguiro-Bautista (2008), and others.

This workshop addresses researchers in linguistic theory and language acquisition/impairment focussing on new cross-linguistic results.It will provide a forum for the discussion of new theoretical approaches and how they relate to the newer findings in acquisition or impairment and the different factors influencing pronoun interpretation: pronoun type, sentence structure, population, and task.

For more information about the German Linguistics Society (DGfS)and the 31^stmeeting in Osnabrück please check the DGfS-website.