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Current Issues in Multilingual First Language Acquisition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2013

Sharon Unsworth
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Abstract

Multilingual first language acquisition refers to the language development of children exposed to two or more languages from birth or shortly thereafter. Much of the research on this topic adopts a comparative approach. Bilinguals are thus compared with their monolingual peers, and trilinguals with both bilinguals and monolinguals; within children, comparisons are made between a child's two (or more) languages, and between different domains within those languages. The goal of such comparisons is to determine the extent to which language development proceeds along similar paths and/or at a similar rate across groups, languages, and domains, in order to elaborate upon the question of whether these different groups acquire language in the same way, and to evaluate how language development in multilingual settings is influenced by environmental factors. The answers to these questions have both theoretical and practical implications.

The goal of this article is to discuss the results of some of this recent research on multilingual first language acquisition by reviewing (a) properties of the developing linguistic system in a variety of linguistic domains and (b) some of the characteristics of multilingual first language acquisition that have attracted attention over the past five years, including cross-linguistic influence, dominance, and input quantity/quality. Trilingual first language acquisition is covered in a dedicated section.

Type
SECTION B: INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETAL MULTILINGUALISM
Information
Annual Review of Applied Linguistics , Volume 33 , March 2013 , pp. 21 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bialystok, E., Luk, G., Peets, K. F., & Yang, S. (2010). Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13, 525–531.

This article examines the receptive vocabulary development of a large (n = 1738) sample of bilingual (English plus another language) children. Analyzing children's scores on the standardized PPVTs, the authors reported consistent bilingual-monolingual differences with monolinguals outperforming bilinguals in English. This difference was largely restricted to words associated with a home rather than school context, and it was not affected by the specific other language being acquired by the bilingual children.

Paradis, J. (2011). Individual differences in child English second language acquisition: Comparing child-internal and child-external factors. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1, 213–237.

This article investigates the impact of a variety of internal (e.g., age, language aptitude) and external (e.g., length of exposure, richness of language environment) factors on early successive bilingual acquisition. Using a series of regression analyses to analyze the relative contribution of each of these factors on children's acquisition of English vocabulary and verbal morphology, Paradis found that child-internal factors explained more variance in outcomes than child-external factors and, in particular, language aptitude as measured by phonological short-term memory and the specific properties of the children's other language were found to be significant predictors.

Place, S., & Hoff, E. (2011). Properties of dual language exposure that influence two-year-olds’ bilingual proficiency. Child Development, 82, 1834–1849.

This article is one of the few studies up to now that systematically explore the role of input quality in bilingual language acquisition. It examines how 2-year-old bilingual English-Spanish children's morphosyntactic and vocabulary development data collected using parental report relate to language environment data collected using a language diary. In line with previous work, the results show that relative amount of input is a significant predictor of (some of the) children's outcomes and in addition, specific properties of the input were also found to affect children's language development. These properties were the number of conversational partners with whom the children spoke English, the number of different speakers providing English input, and the proportion of English input provided by native speakers.

Yip, V., & Matthews, S. (2007). The bilingual child: Early development and language contact. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

This book consists of a detailed longitudinal investigation of the language development of a group of bilingual English-Cantonese children growing up in Hong Kong. It looks at a number of linguistic phenomena where the two languages differ, including wh- questions, null objects, and relative clauses, and considers whether this affects the bilingual children's development relative to monolinguals. The study is couched in generative linguistic terms, and in addition to the detailed data analysis, more general issues related to bilingual language development, including cross-linguistic influence, dominance, and how to measure it, are also discussed.

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