No abstract

No abstract

A yearlong study of the acquisition of German by three American secondary school students reveals influence of orthographic input on their segmental development in phonology. The three had not been exposed to German prior to the year they spent in Germany, they received little explicit instruction on German, and they were the only native English speakers in their communities. Examination of their production of word-initial , which is realized as [z] in German but [s] in English, points to influence of the orthographic input they received while interacting with written text as fully matriculated students in German secondary schools. Despite considerable aural input from their standard German-speaking peers, teachers, and host family members over the 12 months of their stay in Germany, the three learners' production of word-initial was typically [s]. Finer-grained analysis using Praat shows variation in voicing, suggesting these learners were also responding to the aural input.Since the formulation of the critical period hypothesis by Lenneberg (1967), there have been various takes on the hypothesis, including on the second language (L2) acquisition of phonology. These range from multiple critical periods (Seliger, 1978), a fuzzy-edged sensitive rather than critical period (Flege, 1987), to disputes about age of critical period termination. In phonology, studies have long suggested that L2 learners with early versus late exposure are two distinct populations in that younger starters are invariably superior to older starters (e.g., Ioup, 2008). We therefore expect learners' interlanguage phonologies to differ fundamentally as a function of their age of initial exposure to the L2. Yet studies dating back to the early 1980s have indicated that younger and older learners'

Based on data from psychoanalytic long-term psychotherapies, the predictive value of three measures of pre-post change for retrospective patient assessments of outcome at 1-year and 3-year follow-up was investigated. Pre-post changes were measured using the Global Severity Index (GSI), the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems (IIP) total score, and the Heidelberg Structural Change Scale (HSCS). In line with psychoanalytic theory, it was assumed that structural changes cause especially persistent changes and would, therefore, be most suitable to predict the follow-up criterion. This expectation was confirmed: Pre-post changes in GSI and IIP were only weakly associated with assessments at 1-year follow-up and not at all with assessments at 3-year follow-up. In contrast, correlations between changes in HSCS and outcome assessments were highly significant at both occasions.

No abstract