Abstract
The early development of simultaneous bilinguals has been at the core of heated controversy since the mid-seventies. The Unitary Language System Hypothesis by Volterra and Taeschner saw early development as a single language system gradually diverging into two systems . On the contrary, Meisel (1989), De Houwer (1990) and Paradis and Genesee (1996) suggested the early separation of two linguistic systems. Neither position, however, considered language environmental conditions constraining development as key variables. This paper aims to show that the predominant environmental languages to which the Malay-English bilingual child in the current study was alternately exposed might have played an important role in shaping the child’s acquisition of plurality in each language. Throughout the period of investigation (from age 3;4 to 3;10 and at 4;8) the child’s interactions were regularly audio and video recorded. The current study focuses on the development of plural marking in a simultaneous Malay-English bilingual child. Interestingly, at a point when English was environmentally predominant, the child would occasionally use the English plural suffix -s on Malay nouns. After moving back to Malaysia, the child used reduplication to mark plurals in both languages. The findings of this study indicate that the predominant linguistic environment in which the child grows and develops plays an important role in shaping the child’s language production.
Highlights
Bilingualism/multilingualism has become a norm in this age of globalisation
One indicator is that there has been a growing interest in studies on children acquiring more than one language, which reflects the awareness that bilingualism/multilingualism is a very common phenomenon in children (Genesee, 2015)
The use of infixes, is rarely seen in day-to-day language use. Despite these other forms of plural markings in Malay, the current study investigates only the child’s use of plurals at the word level, which is the more typical form of plurals in the child’s environment
Summary
Bilingualism/multilingualism has become a norm in this age of globalisation. One indicator is that there has been a growing interest in studies on children acquiring more than one language, which reflects the awareness that bilingualism/multilingualism is a very common phenomenon in children (Genesee, 2015). The specific field investigating bilingual children’s language acquisition is termed Bilingual First Language Acquisition (BFLA). In many BFLA studies, those investigating the role of contexts are scarce (Lanza, 2004; Qi, 2011). There is far more emphasis on the linguistic structures produced by bilingual children than the situational contexts in which communication takes place. The contexts in which these bilingual youngsters acquire their languages are usually treated as a negligible background variable
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