<i>The bilingual child: Early development and language contact</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The bilingual child: Early development and language contact Jordana F. Garbati Virginia Yip and Stephen Matthew. 2007. The bilingual child: Early development and language contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. xxiii + 295. US $29.99 (softcover). Yip and Matthews' book outlines in great detail their systematic, longitudinal study of the development of Cantonese-English childhood bilingualism. This is one of the first accounts of bilingual development in young children (i.e., ages zero–three) involving a non-European language. The authors' investigation of the linguistic development of bilingual children includes a close examination of the language acquisition of their own three children. In this volume, Yip and Matthews present the theoretical underpinnings of their research, describe the contribution of their study to the field of bilingualism, discuss the methodological issues of their study, and report a range of findings. This book constitutes a new attempt at understanding the complexities of bilingualism. In their introductory chapter, Yip and Matthews highlight their personal involvement with this field of research and this specific study as well as their connection with the principal child learners discussed. They indentify their biases for conducting the study and situate it within the larger context of bilingualism research. In addition, the authors discuss grammaticalization, forms of cross-linguistic influence in monolingual and bilingual development, and the extent to which social context determines language input and outcome. The authors define key terms and clarify ambiguities in definitions (e.g., dominance versus proficiency, transfer versus influence), drawing on current research in the field. This introduction clearly lays out the aim of the book for the reader. The summaries at the end of this and every chapter review key points and terms, direct the reader's focus, and review the goals of the research. In Chapter 1, the authors identify the research questions of the study: (i) How does bilingual development differ from acquisition of the same two languages by monolingual children? (ii) Do the two languages develop independently or rather interact systematically? Is there evidence for transfer or cross-linguistic influence? What factors determine the direction of transfer? (iii) What do the linguistic features of bilingual children's development reveal about [End Page 567] general processes in language acquisition and language contact? (p. 6). The authors discuss the advantages and disadvantages associated with studying one's own children, as they do themselves in this volume. Yip and Matthews also review issues related to the language community, code-switching, second language acquisition strategies, and first language acquisition, topics of interest to educators and researchers interested in this field. They end this chapter with a discussion of language dominance, language contact phenomena, and language transfer. Chapter 2 is devoted to presenting the theoretical framework which informs the authors' research. In their detailed exploration of the literature, the authors draw on recent research to discuss problems of bilingual acquisition, to explore the interaction between grammatical systems in childhood bilingualism and to review theories on cross-linguistic influence, language dominance, and language contact. This theoretical overview is well thought out and the authors provide a clear connection between these theories and their research objectives. In Chapter 3, the authors describe their methodology in detail. After reviewing common methods in bilingualism research—case studies versus cross sectional experimental studies—they evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the methods used in their study. This includes discussion of how they implemented diary studies as one aspect of their data collection strategies and the benefits and drawbacks of incorporating this type of data. The authors highlight the rigorous methodological design of their study in which they used both longitudinal data from the Hong Kong Bilingual Child Language Corpus and the case studies of their own three children. Yip and Matthews clearly describe the main child participants, the language background of the children, and their linguistic experiences. In addition, they outline the children's language contact and developmental patterns over a two-and-a-half-year period and justify the coding. Once again, Yip and Matthews take the opportunity to acknowledge their possible methodological biases. In Chapters 4 through 8, the authors report the findings of their study. Here, they focus on the linguistic themes that arose...