Bilingual First Language Acquisition

Increasingly, children grow up hearing two languages from birth. This comprehensive textbook explains how children learn to understand and speak those languages. It brings together both established knowledge and the latest findings about different areas of bilingual language development. It also includes new analyses of previously published materials. The book describes how bilingually raised children learn to understand and use sounds, words and sentences in two languages. A recurrent theme is the large degree of variation between bilingual children. This variation in how children develop bilingually reflects the variation in their language learning environments. Positive attitudes from the people in bilingual children's language learning environments and their recognition that child bilingualism is not monolingualism-times-two are the main ingredients ensuring that children grow up to be happy and expert speakers of two languages.

This textbook explains how children learn to understand and speak two languages from birth. It brings together both established knowledge and the latest findings about different areas of bilingual language development in a perspective that emphasizes the role of children's language learning environments.

Increasingly, children grow up hearing two languages from birth. This comprehensive textbook explains how children learn to understand and speak those languages. It brings together both established knowledge and the latest findings about different areas of bilingual language development. It also includes new analyses of previously published materials. The book describes how bilingually raised children learn to understand and use sounds, words and sentences in two languages. A recurrent theme is the large degree of variation between bilingual children. This variation in how children develop bilingually reflects the variation in their language learning environments. Positive attitudes from the people in bilingual children's language learning environments and their recognition that child bilingualism is not monolingualism-times-two are the main ingredients ensuring that children grow up to be happy and expert speakers of two languages.

How do children develop bilingual competence? Do bilingual children develop language in the same way as monolinguals? Set in the context of findings on language development, this book examines the acquisition of English and Spanish by two brothers in the first six years of their lives. Based on in-depth and meticulous analyses of naturalistic data, it explores how the systems of both languages affect each other as the children develop, and how different levels of exposure to each language influence the nature of acquisition. The author demonstrates that the children's grammars and lexicons follow a developmental path similar to that of monolinguals, but that cross-linguistic interactions affecting lexical, semantic and discourse-pragmatic aspects arise in Spanish when exposure to it diminishes around the age of four. The first of its kind, this original study is a must-read for students and researchers in bilingualism, child development, language acquisition and language contact.

The chapters in this volume provide the first comprehensive overview of trends in research on early phonological, lexical, syntactic and pragmatic development in children acquiring two (or more) languages simultaneously. Ongoing as well as emerging issues are examined and discussed by leading researchers in the field. Collectively, these studies extend our knowledge of bilingual acquisition and broaden our understanding of the child's ability to acquire and use language. This volume is of interest to researchers working on language acquisition by monolingual and bilingual children, graduate students of psychology, linguistics and communication sciences, and researchers and professionals concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of bilingual children with language impairment.

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Koblenz-Landau, language: English, abstract: This research paper focuses how children acquire two or more languages simultaneously from birth on, how their achievements can be measured and if their development proceeds similar to monolingual children. To a certain extend the argument includes theories of Applied Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistics . Therefore, this analysis can be used as overview or short introduction about the current research on bilingual first language acquisition and may encourage the reader, which might be also a teacher who is likely to face a multilingual environment in his classrooms, to enhance his knowledge in this specific area.

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Other, grade: 2,3, University of Cologne (Englisches Seminar), language: English, abstract: The following paper focuses on bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA). While there is a quantity of fields researched in BFLA, the arguably prior question concerns the development of bilingual learners in comparison to monolingual learners regarding the developmental path and [the] timecourse of language development. This question is based on the assumption, that the acquisition of two languages might challenge a language learner, thereby impeding their process in comparison to monolingual child- learners. To illuminate the different aspects of bilingualism and BFLA, this paper is going to have a look at morphosyntax, the lexicon and phonology, as well as code- mixing andcommunicative competence.

The contributions in this volume are based on an analysis of data from bilingual children acquiring French and German simultaneously. The longitudinal studies started at approximately age one year and six months and continued till age six. The papers focus on the development of specific grammatical phenomena; explanations are given within the framework of the Principle and Parameter approach. The study is primarily concerned with the acquisition of so-called 'functional categories' and the consequences of their acquisition for the development of grammar. Specific points dealt with in these papers include: gender, number and case and their internal structure (DP vs NP); inflection and its consequences for agreement marking; and word order phenomena (subject-raising constructions (incl. passives), word order in subordinate clauses). The basic hypothesis underlying this study is that early child grammars consist only of lexical categories and that functional categories are implemented later in the child's grammar. How this happens exactly is the central issue explored in this book.