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Abstract School-age children (n=39) acquiring Icelandic as a second language were tested yearly over three years on Icelandic measures of language knowledge and language processing. Comparison with native speaker norms revealed large and significant differences for the great majority of the children. Those who scored within the normal monolingual range had a mean length of residence (LOR) of close to 8 years and had arrived to the country at an early age. Raw test scores revealed significant improvement across test times. However, the rate of learning did not occur sufficiently fast for the gap relative to native speakers to diminish over time. Effects of age at arrival and LOR were difficult to tease out. However, children arriving to the country in adolescence performed consistently less well than children with the same LOR arriving in mid childhood. In spite of low scores on standardized tests of language knowledge, the L2 learners scored uniformly high on an Icelandic test of nonword repetition. The acquisition of Icelandic as an L2 appears to occur at a slower rate than the L2 acquisition of English. This may be related to the grammatical complexity of the language as well as to the low global economic value of the Icelandic language.
Thordardottir et al. (Tue,) studied this question.