ABSTRACT
This chapter considers a form of bilingualism that can be found among young immigrants in Germany and Sweden who go to schools which offer bilingual education. It covers a variety of issues such as the optimal age for second-language learning, the relationship between automaticity and interference, the role of language proficiency in determining the direction of interference between languages, and certain strategies in learning a third language. An excellent opportunity to follow various aspects of the second-language acquisition process is provided by the German School in Stockholm. This is a private school where instruction is in German and Swedish at both elementary and high school levels, with German being the dominant classroom language. The chapter examines language processing in bilinguals as measured by speeded performance on simple encoding and decoding tasks such as color, picture, or number naming.
