The Development of Negation in English by a Second Language Learner

The speech of a seven year old Japanese boy recently arrived in Hawaii was examined in light of the hypothesis that non-native speakers, if they are well below the age of puberty, will acquire the grammatical structures of negation in English in the same developmental sequence which has been described for the acquisition of those structures by native speakers. Video tape recordings were made over a period of more than six months at regular intervals. It was found that there was a striking similarity between the developmental substages of negation in the acquisition of English as a first language as described by Klima and Bellugi (1966) and the development of negation in the speech of the subject.