| The purpose of this study was to assess the degree of improvement, maintenance or loss of particular L2 features by a child L2 speaker who was reimmersed in her first language environment. The study focused on the participant's accuracy, during spontaneous conversational interaction, in the use of (a) verb inflections for tense, aspect and number; (b) genitive (possessive) lexical items and (-s) form; (c) number (singular and plural) marking; (d) copula verb ('is/are'); (e) negation patterns; and (f) interrogative patterns. Additionally, the participant's semantic use of the verb 'do' was assessed as a potential indicator of specific L2 lexical item loss, and the participant's overall use of discourse compensation strategies were assessed as potential indicators of overall L2 loss.;The participant was a Japanese first language (L1) speaker who lived in the United States with her family for almost two years, until she was six and a half years of age. One year after the family's return to Japan the girl became my student at an English conversation school in Japan. She attended weekly lessons with me for almost three years, during which time this study's data was collected over a period of one and a half years. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
