Abstract:

This paper deals with the issue of imitation and second language learning at the very young age. The data for this study have benn collected in the course of half a year while observing a child’s language and cognitive development. When the participating observation began, the child was 1;5. Naturalistic caretaker-child speech has been observed while using L2 and L1 elements according to the need of clarification concerning some L2 lexemes. The imitative and spontaneous corpora have been made using the transcript of the child’s speech production. There was observed a kind of interaction between spontaneous and imitation utterances and the length and grammatical construction of the speech acts. We found that at the very beginning imitation utterances were longer and grammatically more advanced, but later, spontaneous speech acts became more and more advanced and the length of utterances also became longer and longer. On the base of observation of the subject and his L2 development we can conclude that at this age both imitation and spontaneous speech production contribute to L2 development.