THE ACQUISITION OF ENGLISH BY VERY YOUNG LEARNERS IN A HUNGARIAN SETTING

The aim of this paper is to highlight some of the phenomena which occur during Acquisition of English in the case of Hungarian children aged 1;5 to 3;0. According to the case study of English language acquisition in the case of Hungarian children at the age of 1;5 begins a considerably rapid onset of production of the elements of the target language. At this age there is a quite short period of language use when, the number of L2 and L1 elements in the child vocabulary is almost the same. In the case when immersion begins at the very beginning of development of the child’s language awareness, it is a natural process for the child to be able to distinguish between the semantic codes of the two languages. At this very short period of language development there is a certain balance between the child’s imperatives and interrogatives uttered in L1 and L2. Besides relying on identifiable contingencies concerning L2 speech production and consequent behaviour of the speaker, the child also bases his L2 utterances on his phonological awareness and development. He will prefer to utter morphemes, which cause no trouble for him phonologically. In this way his L2 production will be a part of his playful activity and the L2 elements will be considered by him as necessary constituents of his game played with unanalized chunks of the target language. While playing this ’game’ with the target language a fall back strategy is used. All these are in close connection with the child’s cognitive development, the segmnents of which are also discussed in this paper.