Input or intimacy

Judit Navracsics

doi:10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.3.6

Abstract

According to the critical period hypothesis, the earlier the acquisition of a second language starts, the better. Owing to the plasticity of the brain, up until a certain age a second language can be acquired successfully according to this view. Early second language learners are commonly said to have an advantage over later ones especially in phonetic/phonological acquisition. Native-like pronunciation is said to be most likely to be achieved by young learners. However, there is evidence of accentfree speech in second languages learnt after puberty as well. Occasionally, on the other hand, a nonnative accent may appear even in early second (or third) language acquisition. Cross-linguistic influences are natural in multilingual development, and we would expect the dominant language to have an impact on the weaker one(s). The dominant language is usually the one that provides the largest amount of input for the child. But is it always the amount that counts? Perhaps sometimes other factors, such as emotions, ome into play? In this paper, data obtained from an EnglishPersian-Hungarian trilingual pair of siblings (under age 4 and 3 respectively) is analyzed, with a special focus on cross-linguistic influences at the phonetic/phonological levels. It will be shown that beyond the amount of input there are more important factors that trigger interference in multilingual development.

Highlights

In the course of multilingual development, the immediate linguistic environment substantially influences the speaker’s language repertoire and linguistic configuration
Multilingual acquisition is more complex than bilingual acquisition because the number of languages and their acquisition order increase the complexity encountered in bilingual systems
It is assumed that bilingualism is the simplest form of multilingualism since important changes occur in the learner of a language as soon as the number of languages involved is more than two

Summary

Introduction

In the course of multilingual development, the immediate linguistic environment substantially influences the speaker’s language repertoire and linguistic configuration. The main factor facilitating the development of the multilingual system, the general language effort, is determined by the speaker’s recognition of his/her communicative needs. While the one parent – one language strategy works excellently in most cases, if either parent has significantly less chance to provide input for the child in their language, the resultant bilingual development does not lead to a quasi-balanced state of the languages in the mind It is known, that language dominance is natural (Grosjean & Li, 2013) and can be partly related to the complementarity principle, which suggests that a bilingual or multilingual person uses his or her languages in different domains of life, respectively. The recordings were transcribed and the transcripts were included in the CHILDES database (Navracsics, 2004)

Language use in the family

GLE and the functional distribution of the three languages

The struggle against transitional trilingualism

Cross-linguistic influences in trilingual language development

Concluding remarks