THE ACQUISITION OF SPATIAL RELATIONS IN A SECONDLANGUAGE.Angelika Becker and Mary Carroll. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1997.Pp. xii + 212. $45.00 cloth.

Abstract

This volume, the third in the Studies in Bilingualism series from the European Science Foundation's research on adult immigrants' L2 acquisition, begins with the observation that we have widely accepted the idea that learners' varieties and the transitions from one variety to the next are systematic, yet we have little research that records this systematicity. This study does exactly that by following for 30 months 10 L2 learners' developing linguistic means for indicating spatial relations. Carroll reports on two Italian speakers acquiring English; Becker on four Italian speakers and a Turkish speaker acquiring German; and Giacobbe, Perdue, and Porquier on two Spanish speakers and a Moroccan Arabic speaker acquiring French. To elicit the core data, the researchers asked the learners to describe pictures and to provide stage directions for a scene they had viewed to someone who had not seen it.