1977-(ongoing)

Two years after their return to Germany the three younger children of the 1975 project on L2 English/L1 German had forgotten their English almost completely. In 1977 the family returned to the same town in California for six weeks to collect data on how the children would re-acquire or revive their English. By the end of the 6-week stay the children were back where they had left off in 1975, and they may even have gone further. The analyses were focussed on the same structural areas as with the 1975 corpus when English was acquired as the L2 for the first time. Therefore, it was claimed that re-acquisition is not re-learning the language, but reviving it.

Principal collaborators: S. Allendorf, B. Pries, A. Rohde, A. Peters, T. Schnell, J.-L. Schrader