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3 - Multilingualism in Early Childhood: The Role of the Input

from Part One - Becoming and Being a Multilingual Child

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2022

By
Margaret Deuchar
Edited by
Anat Stavans  and
Ulrike Jessner
Anat Stavans
Affiliation:
Beit Berl College, Israel
Ulrike Jessner
Affiliation:
Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck, Austria
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Summary

This chapter takes a critical approach to what we know about the role of the input in multilingual development in early childhood. We include a historical background on competing theoretical approaches to language acquisition in which we argue that usage-based approaches gained traction through the attention paid to input in multilingual acquisition studies. However, in reviewing such studies we draw attention to the limitations of their focus on parental rather than community input. We also draw attention to the need to go beyond the binary distinction of simultaneous and successive acquisition and take into account more fully the child’s age of acquisition in relation to the development of specific areas of language. We review the findings on the link between code-switching or mixing in the input and child productions, pointing out the range of different methodological approaches in identifying mixing. We advocate a more child-centred approach in which the morphosyntactic frame of the child’s utterance is taken into account, and illustrate this with our own study. Finally we argue that future studies should include full ethnographic information about the community setting in which multilingual acquisition takes place.

Keywords

inputcode-switchinglanguage acquisitionmultilingualismbilingual acquisition
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Childhood Multilingualism , pp. 58 - 81
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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