Abstract
A multitude of factors characterizes bi- and multilingual compared to monolingual language acquisition. Two of the most prominent viewpoints have recently been put in perspective and enriched by a third (Tsimpli, 2014): age of onset of children's exposure to their native languages, the role of the input they receive, and the timing in monolingual first language development of the phenomena examined in bi- and multilingual children's performance. This article picks up a fourth potential factor (Grohmann, 2014b): language proximity, that is, the closeness between the two or more grammars a multilingual child acquires. It is a first attempt to flesh out the proposed gradient scale of multilingualism within the approach dubbed “comparative bilingualism.” The empirical part of this project comes from three types of research: (i) the acquisition and subsequent development of pronominal object clitic placement in two closely related varieties of Greek by bilectal, binational, bilingual, and multilingual children; (ii) the performance on executive control tasks by monolingual, bilectal, and bi- or multilingual children; and (iii) the role of comparative bilingualism in children with a developmental language impairment for both the diagnosis and subsequent treatment as well as the possible avoidance or weakening of how language impairment presents.
Highlights
Language acquisition in the multicultural, multiethnic, and especially multilingual environments in which children grow up more and more frequently needs to be paid, correspondingly, closer attention to
We address a third line of inquiry on the issue of comparative bilingualism, vis-àvis multilingual language acquisition: the role of bilingualism in children with developmental language impairment, where we will briefly consider the diagnosis and subsequent treatment of multilingualdevelopmentally impaired children
Addressing the present Frontiers research topic, we take “the grammar of multilingualism” to be a highly complex area of research that by definition needs to include a lot of different measurements—by which we mean, ideally, the investigation of different measures, different sets of data, different populations, all carried out by interdisciplinary research teams
Summary
Language acquisition in the multicultural, multiethnic, and especially multilingual environments in which children grow up more and more frequently needs to be paid, correspondingly, closer attention to. We focus on reporting data collected on the acquisition and subsequent development of object clitic placement in the two closely related varieties of Greek by bilectal (Grohmann, 2011, 2014a; Grohmann et al, 2012), binational (Leivada et al, 2010), and bilectal bilingual or multilingual children (Karpava and Grohmann, 2014) This total number of participants breaks down as follows: 727 children from public kindergarten, pre-school, and primary school, 20 teenagers from public middle and high school, and 40 adults from university and the general employment sector, with an eye on gender balance. We observe that both bilectal and bilingual children struggle with the contextappropriate form, which arguably involves a certain amount of maturation and metalinguistic awareness
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