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Bilingual First Language Acquisition

Bilingual First Language Acquisition

Dr. Annick De Houwer

(2009)

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Book Details

Abstract

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.


The study of bilingual first language acquisition has truly come of age with the publication of a first textbook devoted to this fascinating topic. De Houwer's highly readable volume is both comprehensive and stimulating in its presentation of various aspects of bilingual language development - a must-read for students embarking on this field of research.


Elizabeth Lanza, Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo, Norway

A timely contribution to a field gradually coming into its own, this is the first textbook to focus on bilingual first-language eLl) acquisition. With its userfriendly presentation, this volume should be accessible to an interdisciplinary readership and could help to popularize the field.


Virginia Yip, Chinese University of Hong Kong

Annick De Houwer has recently been appointed as Chair of Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Erfurt in Germany. She is also the new Director of the Language Center there. In addition, Professor De Houwer holds the title of Collaborative Investigator to the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (U.S.A.). Her PhD was based on a dissertation on bilingual acquisition, a topic she has since continued to work on steadily. Her book The Acquisition of Two Languages from Birth (CUP, 1990) is widely cited in the bilingual acquisition literature. Dr. De Houwer has also published on Dutch child language, attitudes towards child language, teen language, and intralingual subtitling. She has extensive editorial experience.


This book has everything the student needs. The survey of the literature is thorough and each study is related to the core "big issues" of language balance, language differentiation, lexical overlap, and language interaction. De Houwer explains in detail the use of important tools such as auditory preference measures, the Communicative Development Inventory, and the CHILDES bilingual database in ways that will allow the student to begin real research projects. The exposition is crowned by a final chapter on what it means for two languages to exist harmoniously in the young bilingual. This is a masterful introduction to one of the fastest growing areas in language studies.


Brian MacWhinney, Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
Contents vii
Acknowledgements xi
Preface xiii
Some technical notes about this book xv
Disclaimer xvii
1 Introducing Bilingual First Language Acquisition 1
What is Bilingual First Language Acquisition (BFLA)? 2
The family as the primary socialization unit for BFLA 7
Is BFLA a common phenomenon? 9
A brief history of the study of BFLA 10
Summary box 14
Suggestions for study activities 15
Recommended reading 15
2 Bilingual children’s language development: An overview 17
Early interaction, socialization and the child’s own developmental path 19
Language learning in the first year at the intersection of interaction, socialization and maturation 20
An outline of bilingual development in the first five years of life 29
Normal variation in BFLA and MFLA 40
Bilingual children’s language repertoires 41
Language choice 46
The relation between BFLA children’s two developing languages 47
Summary box 50
Suggestions for study activities 50
Recommended reading 51
3 Research methods in BFLA 53
Why this chapter is important even if you are not embarking on a study of BFLA 55
Need for bilingual researchers 56
Subject selection: Making sure you are dealing with BFLA 57
Deciding on how many subjects you should study 57
When and where to collect data: Need for sociolinguistic authenticity 59
Data handling: Transcription and coding 60
CHILDES as an important tool in BFLA for corpus-based work 66
Bilingual corpora available through CHILDES 69
The CDI as an important tool for lexical research in BFLA 71
Other recommendations specific to BFLA 76
Need to clearly describe the BFLA learning context 77
Summary box 79
Suggestions for study activities 79
Recommended reading (advanced) 80
4 Socializing environments and BLFA 83
Preliminaries 86
It all starts with love... and positive attitudes 86
Attitudes and beliefs 90
Bilingual children’s language learning environments 96
What BFLA children hear: Young BFLA children’s linguistic soundscapes 98
Language models 104
The role of language presentation 107
Language orientation 116
Input frequency in BFLA 119
What BFLA children say: Changes in BFLA children’s linguistic soundscapes and their effects 127
Speaking the ‘right’ language and what it depends on 132
Explaining the composition of young BFLA children’s linguistic repertoires 145
Summary box 148
Suggestions for study activities 148
Recommended reading 149
5 Sounds in BFLA 151
Breaking the code 153
The sounding world of BFLA children 156
Early bilingual speech perception 160
Speech perception and word learning 164
Making the melody of speech 166
Bilingual babbling 167
More on melody 171
Syllable structure and stress as used by BFLA children 172
Bilingual speech segments 175
Phonological processes 180
Perfecting their skills 183
In conclusion 185
Summary box 187
Suggestions for study activities 188
Recommended reading (advanced) 190
6 Words in BFLA 191
The words that BFLA children hear 193
Early bilingual word comprehension 198
Translation equivalents in comprehension 202
The Mutual Exclusivity Bias in BFLA 205
Early comprehension vocabularies: BFLA and MFLA compared 206
Comprehension and production: Two sides of the same coin? 209
Words and meanings in early production 212
Early bilingual word production 217
The rate of lexical development in bilingual production 223
How many words do BFLA children produce? 226
The size of BFLA early production vocabularies compared to MFLA 228
Translation equivalents in production 230
What drives the production of TEs, or what hinders it? 236
Translation equivalents and language choice 238
In conclusion 241
Summary box 246
Suggestions for study activities 247
Recommended reading (advanced) 248
7 Sentences in BFLA 251
The need for more meanings 253
The grammatical status of early word combinations 254
Different paths in learning to combine words 255
When do BFLA children first start to combine words from scratch? 256
Lexical development and the transition into sentences 259
Beyond early word combinations: Sentences 263
Sentences and BFLA children’s language repertoires and language choice 267
Unequal skill in Language A and Language Alpha 272
The Separate Development Hypothesis: BFLA children’s sentences develop separately in each language 277
The Separate Development Hypothesis: Methodological issues 280
What makes separate development possible? 284
Crosslinguistic influence in unilingual utterances 287
BFLA compared to MFLA 288
BFLA compared to ESLA 290
The structural features of mixed utterances 291
The development of narrative 293
In conclusion 295
Summary box 299
Suggestions for study activities 299
Recommended reading (advanced) 301
8 Harmonious bilingual development 303
The whole child 305
BFLA: Good or bad? 307
Comparisons with monolinguals 308
Harmonious bilingual development or the lack of it 310
And what happens when BFLA children get older? 324
Needed: An alternative research paradigm 326
In conclusion 327
Summary box 330
Suggestions for study activities 330
Recommended reading 331
Resources for parents and educators 331
Appendix A 333
Appendix B 337
Appendix C 341
Appendix D 343
Appendix E 346
Appendix F 348
Appendix G 350
Appendix H 354
Appendix I 356
Glossary 359
Bibliography 371
Child index 405
Language index 407
Subject index 409