(652)THE ROLE OF IMITATION IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

摘要

This paper deals with the issue of imitation and second language learning at the very young age. Thedata for this study have been collected in the course of half a year while observing a child’s languageand cognitive development. When the participating observation began, the child was 1;5. Naturalisticcaretaker-child speech has been observed while using L2 and L1 elements according to the need ofclarification concerning some L2 lexemes. The imitative and spontaneous corpora have been madeusing the transcript of the child’s speech production. There was observed a kind of interactionbetween spontaneous and imitation utterances and the length and grammatical construction of thespeech acts. We found that at the very beginning imitation utterances were longer and grammaticallymore advanced, but later, spontaneous speech acts became more and more advanced and the lengthof utterances also became longer and longer. On the base of observation of the subject and his L2development we can conclude that at this age both imitation and spontaneous speech productioncontribute to L2 development.