According to Fillmore, her children did get some "mother-ese" from their playmates, who did many things that fit the descriptions of parental modification of language described for child L1 acquisition and informal child L2 acquisition (Clark and Clark, 1977; Brown and Hanlon, 1970; Wagner-Gough and Hatch, 1975). However, the overall input to these children may have been very complex, more so than the analytic acquirer usually gets. They were also faced with classroom input and much child input that, at least at first, they could not understand.

Fillmore's analysis shows clearly that under certain conditions the "gestalt" mode may be encouraged to a remarkable degree. It does not demonstrate that all language is acquired this way by all acquirers or even that the analytic style may be totally circumvented.

Routines and Patterns in Adult Second Language Acquisition

The use of routines and patterns is reported in only one adult study to our knowledge. (This rarity is undoubtedly due more to the paucity of data on adult second language acquisition than to the lack of automatic speech in adult second language performance.) Hanania and Gradman (1977) studied the English development of Fatmah, a 19-year-old Arabic speaker living in the United States. Fatmah had little formal schooling in Arabic and encountered English "primarily in natural communicative settings" (p. 76). Hanania and Gradman report that at the start of their study, Fatmah's English output "consisted mainly of memorized items that are commonly used in social contexts with children". They also noted that "the use of these expressions, however, does not imply that she recognized the individual words within them, or that she was able to use the words in new combinations. They were merely strings of sounds that she used appropriately in particular situations" (p. 78). In other words, she knew routines.

Fatmah also used patterns in the early stages: "An attempt was made to find out if Fatmah recognized units with sentences and could use them in new combinations, but such activity was apparently alien to her learning strategies. Structures like Thank you, I can't..., Do you like...?, were perceived as single units, and she resisted segmentation.

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