Pronoun acquisition in a Mandarin— English bilingual child

Abstract

Studies on bilingual first language acquisition mainly concern the formal aspects of bilingual children’s language development. In-depth studies on the development of the personal pronoun system have so far received little attention in the literature. The longitudinal study is a first attempt to trace the developmental route of personal pronouns in an unbalanced 2L1 Chinese Mandarin—English child. Pragmatic and semantic issues relating to pronoun usage are addressed in order to examine order of emergence and production patterns of personal pronouns in Mandarin and English. The results are discussed in relation to the theoretical hypotheses and are compared to monolingual data. Findings seem to support speech role hypothesis. In other words, the bilingual child has no problem with the speech role function of pronouns. Further, this study provides some exploration into the role of the weaker language in bilingual language development as well as the nature and extent of the early separation and interaction of two linguistic systems in a language environment which is fundamentally unlike the one-parent-one-language setting. The results suggest that the bilingual child has a differentiated development in his two languages: that the two languages are not developed at the same rate, nor by the same route or the same strategy. The weaker language develops smoothly and in the same pattern as L1. In addition, this bilingual child adopts complementary strategies to reach two target usages of personal pronouns despite the apparent unbalanced input and output of his two languages. The data set of the current study consists of over 65 tape-recorded sessions of naturalistic speech collected over 30 months in context-based language use either Mandarin or English, where Mandarin is the home (and ethnic community) language spoken by both parents and other family members while English is the (dominant) language of all other environments.