Abstract
AbstractMany human infants grow up learning more than one language simultaneously but only recently has research started to study early language acquisition in this population more systematically. The paper gives an overview on findings on early language acquisition in bilingual infants during the first two years of life and compares these findings to current knowledge on early language acquisition in monolingual infants. Given the state of the research, the overview focuses on research on phonological and early lexical development in the first two years of life. We will show that the developmental trajectory of early language acquisition in these areas is very similar in mono- and bilingual infants suggesting that these early steps into language are guided by mechanisms that are rather robust against the differences in the conditions of language exposure that mono- and bilingual infants typically experience.
Highlights
For a long time, monolingual language acquisition has been in the focus of research and only recently has simultaneous bilingual early language acquisition attracted more scientific attention
Some studies seem to suggest a delay in bilingual infants. These results can be taken as additional support for the assumption that there is no strict continuity between the detection of language specific phonological categories during the first year of life and the use of this knowledge in lexical processing. These results support the view that lexical development itself contributes to the fine-tuning of the phonological system which – given the slower growth of the vocabularies in each of the languages in bilingual infants – may in turn hinder the use of phonetic details in word learning
The review presented here allowed us to start understanding the impact of bilingualism on early language acquisition, and we have outlined similarities and differences in the bilingual versus monolingual developmental trajectory
Summary
Monolingual language acquisition has been in the focus of research and only recently has simultaneous bilingual early language acquisition attracted more scientific attention. Research on monolinguals has started to establish that these early acquisitions are related to later language outcomes (Höhle, Pauen, Hesse & Weissenborn, 2014; Junge, Kooijman, Hagoort & Cutler, 2012; Kooijman, Junge, Johnson, Hagoort & Cutler, 2013; Newman, Ratner, Jusczyk, Jusczyk & Dow, 2006; Singh, Reznick & Xuehua, 2012; Tsao, Liu & Kuhl, 2004; Von Holzen, Nishibayashi & Nazzi, 2018) Given this age constraint, we consider the target population as being simultaneous bilinguals without any need to discuss borders between simultaneous and successive bilingualism in children or between acquiring two L1s and acquiring one L1 and one L2. We will discuss the state of knowledge that the reviewed research provides, concerning various factors that need to be considered in trying to understand the commonalities and differences between mono- and multilingual early language acquisition
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