Jürgen Meisel

Jürgen M. Meisel is emeritus Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Hamburg, with a later affiliation at the University of Calgary, and one of the chief editors of Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. He sits at the hinge between two traditions that do not always meet: the German SLA project of the late 1970s and a long research programme on early bilingual first-language acquisition.

The ZISA project — Zweitspracherwerb Italienischer und Spanischer Arbeiter — is the common ancestry he shares with Manfred Pienemann and Harald Clahsen. The recordings of adult Italian and Spanish migrant workers learning German showed staged development in word order that could not be explained by proficiency alone, and that finding seeded Processability Theory a decade later. Meisel's own work turned toward bilingual children, arguing on long-term French-German longitudinal data that simultaneous bilinguals differentiate their grammatical systems early and pass through the same developmental phases as monolinguals given sufficient input. That claim is the heart of Bilingual First Language Acquisition and of his influence on the bilingualism literature.

Career

• Professor of French, Portuguese, and Spanish, University of Hamburg (retired)
• Research fellow appointments at Calgary
• Co-founder of ZISA project, Wuppertal/Hamburg, late 1970s
• Chief editor, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (Cambridge)

Published Work

• Bilingual First Language Acquisition: French and German grammatical development (ed., 1994, Benjamins)
• Bilingual Children: From Early Development to Old Age (Cambridge)
• ZISA-era papers on developmental sequences in adult L2 German

Influence

• Established the empirical base for staged development that became Processability Theory
• A defining figure in bilingual acquisition research, especially the "two separate systems from the start" position
• A durable bridge between European and Anglophone SLA traditions