Bilingual Acquisition Research Articles

Native sound category formation in simultaneous bilingual acquisition

The consequences of early bilingual exposure on the perceptual reorganization processes that occur by the end of the first year of life were analyzed in a series of experiments on the capacity to discriminate vowel and consonant contrasts, comparing monolingual and bilingual infants (Catalan/Spanish) at different age levels. For bilingual infants, the discrimination of target vowel contrasts, which reflect different amount of overlapping and acoustic distance between the two languages of exposure, suggested a U-shaped developmental pattern. A similar trend was observed in the bilingual infants discrimination of a fricative voicing contrast, present in only one of the languages in their environment. The temporary decline in sensitivity found at 8 months for vowel targets and at 12 months for the voicing contrast reveals the specific perceptual processes that bilingual infants develop in order to deal with their complex linguistic input. Data from adult bilingual subjects on a lexical decision task involving these contrasts add to this developmental picture and suggest the existence of a dominant language even in simultaneous bilingual acquisition. [Work supported by JSMF 10001079BMB.]

Language convergence and bilingual acquisition

This study concerns the simultaneous acquisition of conditional constructions in Chinese-English bilingual preschool children in Singapore. Cross-sectional data are obtained from subjects ranging from 2;10 to 6;06. The target languages are Singapore Colloquial English (SCE) and Singapore Colloquial Mandarin (SCM), both of which are contact varieties that are representative of the Low varieties in a diglossic situation. The bilingual acquisition of structural features of conditionals is investigated by adopting the Head-marking and Dependent-marking typological framework (Nichols 1986). Two elicited imitation experiments were conducted, with Experiment 1 aimed at examining if the structural convergence between SCE and SCM that is evident at a societal level is also represented in the developing linguistic repertoires of the bilingual preschool children. Experiment 2 is a follow-up study designed to investigate if convergence between the two languages is also evident at an individual level. Results obtained in Experiment 1 suggest that convergence between the two developing linguistic systems is indeed apparent. Also evident is the influence of Chinese on SCE, while the influence of English on SCM is less apparent. At the individual level, however, a general lack of convergence between the two developing grammars within a single subject is observed in Experiment 2: the marking preferences for SCE and SCM conditionals tend not to coincide for a particular subject, suggesting that the two languages are represented as distinct grammatical systems for the bilingual children.

Trends in Bilingual Acquisition (review)

Trends in Bilingual Acquisition (review)

Bilingualism

04–652 Castro, D. and Gavruseva, E. (University of Iowa; Email: elena-gavruseva@uiowa.edu). Finiteness and aspect in Spanish/English bilingual acquisition. First Language (Bucks, UK), 23, 2 (2003), 171–192.04–653 Gutierrez-Clellen, Vera F. (San Diego State U., CA, USA; Email: vclellen@mail.sdsu.edu) and Kreiter, Jacqueline. Understanding child bilingual acquisition using parent and teacher reports. Applied Psycholinguistics (Cambridge, UK), 24, 2 (2003), 267–288.04–654 Jaffe, Alexandra (California State U., USA; Email: ajaffe@csulb.edu). Talk around text: literacy practices, cultural identity and authority in a Corsican bilingual classroom. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Clevedon, UK), 6, 3&4 (2003), 202–220.04–655 Marian, Viorica (Northwestern U., IL, USA; Email: v-marian@northwestern.edu) and Spivey, Michael. Bilingual and monolingual processing of competing lexical items. Applied Psycholinguistics (Cambridge, UK), 24, 2 (2003), 173–194.04–656 Martin, D., Krishnamurthy, R., Bhardwaj, M. and Charles, R. (School of Education, University of Birmingham, UK; Email: d.m.martin@bham.ac.uk). Language change in young Panjabi/English children: implications for bilingual language assessment. Child Language Teaching and Therapy (London, UK), 19, 3 (2003), 245–266.04–657 Olmedo, Irma M. (College of Education, U. of Illinois-Chicago, USA; Email: iolmedo@uic.edu). Language mediation among emergent bilingual children. Linguistics and Education (New York, USA), 14, 2 (2003), 143–162.04–658 Ruan, J. (U. of Oklahoma, USA). Toward a culture-sensitive pedagogy: emergent literacy learning in Chinese-English bilinguals in America. Language, Culture and Curriculum (Clevedon, UK), 16, 1 (2003), 39–47.04–659 Seeff-Gabriel, B. (Department of Human Communication Science, University College London; Email: b.seeff@ucl.ac.uk). Phonological processing: a platform for assisting second-language learners with English spelling. Child Language Teaching and Therapy (Clevedon, UK), 19, 3 (2003), 291–310.

Review: Trends in Bilingual Acquisition

1Birkbeck College, University of London Trends in Bilingual Acquisition Jasone Cenoz Fred Genesee John Benjamins 2001

Understanding child bilingual acquisition using parent and teacher reports

There is limited research regarding what levels of proficiency in each language should characterize the language behavior of bilingual children and the impact of language exposure or language use variables on bilingual performance. This study was designed to examine the extent to which years of exposure to a language(s), amount of language input at home and at school, and amount of exposure to reading and other literacy activities in a language(s) relate to observed bilingual performance in young children, as obtained from parent and teacher reports. A secondary goal was to determine the extent to which parents or teachers could assist in determining language status by examining relationships between their ratings of the child's use and proficiency in the two languages and the child's grammatical performance. Fifty-seven children and their families were sampled from second grade classes of a large school district serving primarily low-income families in southern California. Multiple regression analyses for each language indicated that amount of Spanish input at home was a significant predictor of grammatical performance in that language. These input effects did not hold for English. Although there were some crosslinguistic differences, parent and teacher ratings of use and proficiency correlated with the child's grammatical performance in the target language. The findings suggest that parent and teacher estimates may be useful to determine bilingual status.

Finiteness and Aspect in Spanish/English Bilingual Acquisition

The article investigates the acquisition of finiteness in the languages of a Spanish/English bilingual child (Mina, 1;9.5-2;6.21). We use the `underspecification of AspP hypothesis' of Gavruseva (2002 b, 2003) to argue that a non-finite root stage is attested in both Spanish and English, despite the fact that the two languages evolve as grammars with distinct INFLs (Rizzi 1993/94, Wexler 1998). It is shown that the use of non-finite and finite root predicates is determined by the verb's Aktionsart or, more precisely, by the verb's telicity semantics. We also argue that developmental trends support the `two separate systems' hypothesis of bilingual acquisition (Genesee 1989), with the similarities following from the undespecified aspectual heads in both grammars and the differences following from the morphological properties of inflectional paradigms.

French-English bilingual acquisition of phonology: One production system or two?

We examine the onset, atrophy and possible interaction of a set of patterns in the speech of our child(Tom) acquiring French and English, from first words(1;8.0—1;10.0) until 2;6.0. The patterns are: (a) consonant harmony (CH); (b) reduplication(REDUP), (c) an iambic stress contour(IAMBIC) for all words, whether French or English, up until the age of 2;2.21,(d) the over generalization of word-final[t](WFT), operational until around 2;5.14, (e) avoidance of word-initial voiceless fricatives(AVOIDVF), operational until the age of 2;6.00, (f) the emergence of a preponderance of English monosyllabic words ending in a consonant(MONOC) from 2;5.00 onwards. Our aim is twofold. We ask how our data bear on the question of whether the bilingual child has two distinct production phonologies from the earliest stage(1;8.0—1;10.0). We also use our data to test recent claims, (a) that placelessness plays a role in CH patterns(Harrison,1999) and(b) that CH is driven by foot structure, such that the differing foot structures of English and French give rise to different patterns of CH in children acquiring English and French(Rose,2000). With respect to the first aim, one of our main findings is that two segmental phenomena(CH and reduplication) in Tom's speech showed clear differentiation between English and French, with CH occurring(we claim) exclusively in Tom's English lexis, and reduplication exclusively in Tom's French lexis. We cannot, however, show that this differentiation was present from the earliest stage, since Tom's word productions at that stage are(we claim) exclusively French1. Unlike CH and reduplication, other segmental patterns showed “leakage” of a pattern from one language to another. We consider a nonsegmental pattern(Tom's word stress pattern), showing that this exhibited differentiation only at a later stage. Tom's segmental patterns and processes showed complex patterns of interaction, while there was no interaction between his segmental patterns and his word stress constraints. With respect to our second aim, we argue that appeals to “placelessness”in describing CH lack explanatory value. We also show that our data do not support the claims(a) that CH is driven by foot structure and (b)that the distinct foot structures of English and French lead to distinct patterns of CH in children acquiring those languages, whether monolingually or bilingually.

Subject realization and crosslinguistic interference in the bilingual acquisition of Spanish and English: what is the role of the input?

This study investigated whether crosslinguistic interference occurs in the domain of subject realization in Spanish in a bilingual acquisition context. We were also interested in exploring whether the source of the interference is due to child-internal crosslanguage contact between English and Spanish, as is commonly assumed, or due to the nature of the language input in a bilingual family, a factor which has not typically been considered in studies of crosslinguistic influence. The use of subjects in a null subject language like Spanish is a phenomenon linked to the pragmatics/syntax interface of the grammar, and thus, is a domain where crosslinguistic interference is predicted to be likely to occur in bilingual acquisition (Müller & Hulk, 2001). Using spontaneous language data available from CHILDES (www.childes.psy.cmu.edu), we examined the use of overt subjects in Spanish by two Spanish monolingual children (ages: 1;8-2;7 and 1;8-1;11) one Spanish-English bilingual child (age 1;9-2;6) and their parental interlocutors. We looked at the proportions of overt versus null subjects as well as the discourse-pragmatic contexts of overt subject use by the children in order to uncover bilingual/monolingual differences in the distributional properties and the functional determinants of subject realization. We also looked at identical variables in the speech of the children's parental interlocutors to investigate the potential influence of the input on the children's output. Our results suggest that the bilingual child showed patterns in her subject realizations in Spanish that could be interpreted as due to crosslinguistic effects from English; however, there is also evidence that these effects may have a source in the input, rather than resulting from internal crosslanguage contact. While our data do not permit us to distinguish conclusively between these two possible sources, they indicate that future research on crosslinguistic influence in bilingual acquisition should take input into account.

Economy and word order patterns in bilingual English-Dutch acquisition

The proposal has been made (Zuckerman, 1999, 2001, with various antecedents) that economy of derivation is operative in language acquisition in such a way that whenever movement appears to be optional to the child, s/he chooses the derivation without movement. In this paper we undertake the task of finding evidence for this claim in monolingual and bilingual acquisition. We draw on data available in the literature and on original data from a bilingual English-Dutch child. This child's word order patterns testify to the fact that movement never occurs beyond the target (e.g. there are no V2 embedded clauses in his Dutch productions), and when deviant word orders are attested they result from lack of raising (in particular, lack of verb raising in embedded sentences in English). These patterns are predicted if economy of derivation holds; further, bilingual children, having as input languages with possibly diverging parameter settings, are especially prone to an extended parameter setting period, giving rise to deviant word order patterns, and thus offering insight into the mechanisms of language acquisition.

Raising Children Bilingual: : Should We, and When?

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 2003, Vol 48(5), 667-669. Reviews the book, Bilingualism in Development: Language, Literacy, and Cognition by Ellen Bialystok (see record 2001-01047-000). It is contended that misconceptions abound in our society about raising children bilingual. Folk wisdom and educational policy both present childhood bilingualism negatively despite scientific evidence to the contrary. “Bilingualism in Development” demonstrates clearly the advantages of being bilingual early on, from early development of phonological awareness to quantity judgment, from literacy to problem solving, and from cognitive to personality benefits. Most current theories of psycholinguistics are built on studies of language processing in adults, and most developmental theories of language are built on what we know about children's learning in monolingual contexts. Bilingualism in Development takes us beyond this divide to a formidable task of children's learning of two or more languages early on. In this book Bialystok does a beautiful job in instilling the latest theories and issues, integrating monolingual and bilingual language acquisition, and expanding the horizon beyond. It takes true scholarship to do this. I can only concur with the author at her conclusion for the relative lack of research in this domain: “Meaningful studies of bilingual children often require intersecting skills in cognition, linguistics, sociology, and education, a combination not usually enlisted by most researchers” (p. 248). To some scholars, the book's discussions may at times appear sketchy. For example, there is no detailed description of the development of the bilingual lexicon with respect to initial semantic learning (does syntactic bootstrapping play a role? cf. Gleitman, 1990), growth profile (is there a vocabulary spurt in each language? cf. Bloom, 2000), or structural change (how does semantic organization takes place for two competing lexicons? cf. Bowerman, 1982). To others, a deeper question may be asked about why young children, but not adult learners, have the selective attention advantage (perhaps because the learning histories and contexts of usage are very different for children and adults? cf. Grosjean, 1997). To still others, mechanistic formalism of billingualism in development is lacking (e.g., how connectionist models can be implemented; cf. Li, 2002; Li & Farkas, 2002). However, none of these concerns is sufficiently great to warrant dismissal of the book's intellectual strength. I would enthusiastically recommend this book to any cognitive scientists interested in bilingualism, for its ability to identify important psycholinguistic mechanisms and its integration of issues across a wide range of cognitive domains. I would also recommend the book highly to neuroscientists interested in bilingual issues, as neuroscientists have embarked on an important enterprise of imaging bilinguals (see Grosjean, Li, Munte, & Rodriguez-Fornells, 2003; but note Bialystok's critical view on this enterprise; pp. 91-95). However, I would be rather hesitant to recommend the book to parents and teachers, as it is more of a scientific text than a practical guide, compared with other texts out there for lay readers (e.g., Cunningham-Andersson & Andersson, 1999). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)

What's the difference between ‘toilet paper’ and ‘paper toilet’? French-English bilingual children's crosslinguistic transfer in compound nouns

Bilingual acquisition can shed light on the cues children used in acquiring language. The purpose of this paper was to examine whether frequency, ambiguity or language dominance could explain crosslinguistic transfer in compound nouns. Crosslinguistic transfer would appear in the form of compound reversals. 25 monolingual English children between the ages of three and four years and 25 age-matched French-English bilingual children were asked to create and indicate their understanding of novel compound nouns. In production, the bilingual children reversed compounds in English more often than the monolingual children but equally often in French and English. In comprehension, there were no differences between groups. These results cannot be explained by any previous explanation of transfer. Implications for the theory of language acquisition are discussed.

On the interaction of phonological systems in child bilingual acquisition

On the interaction of phonological systems in child bilingual acquisition

Developing vowel systems as a window to bilingual phonology

This study examines the vowel systems of German-Spanish bilingual children in order to determine whether there is interaction between the two language systems. German has a larger vowel inventory than Spanish and also contains an opposition between long and short vowels. Given the differences in the vowel systems, which point to a more marked system in the case of German, two predictions are considered: (a) bilingual children will acquire the vowel length contrast in their German productions later than monolingual German-speaking children; and (b) bilingual children will acquire Spanish vowels similarly to monolingual children. In the German analysis, monosyllabic and disyllabic trochaic words were transcribed and acoustically analyzed. In the Spanish analysis, monosyllabic, disyllabic, and trisyllabic words were transcribed and a perceptual judgment was made as to whether the vowel production was a possible allophonic variant of the target vowel. The results confirmed both predictions. Bilingual children were delayed relaof the target vowel. The results confirmed both predictions. Bilingual children were delayed relative to monolingual children in the acquisition of the German vowel length contrast and displayed similar performance to monolingual children in the production of Spanish vowels. In the conclusion, the relevance of the findings to bilingual acquisition and to the acquisition of vowel length representation in children's grammars is discussed.

Bilingual Children Referred for Psychiatric Services: Associations of Language Disorders, Language Skills, and Psychopathology

To investigate (1) the prevalence of language deficits and disorders and (2) the relationship of bilingual language skills and psychopathology, in Spanish-English bilingual children referred for child and adolescent psychiatry services. Bilingual language skills, emotional/behavioral problems, sociodemographics, immigration variables, and nonverbal IQ were studied in 50 consecutively referred children. Estimated prevalence was high for language deficits (48%) and disorders (41%), with most cases (>79%) being of the mixed receptive-expressive type. In children with clinically significant emotional/behavioral problems, bilingual language skills were strongly and inversely correlated with problem scores, particularly global problems (r = -0.67, p < .001); social, thought, and attention problems (r > or = -0.54; p < .004); delinquency (r = -0.66, p < .001); and aggression (r = -0.52, p < .01). These correlations remained significant after IQ adjustment. Prior findings from monolingual children were confirmed in this bilingual sample, namely (1) the high prevalence of mixed receptive-expressive and other language disorders and delays and (2) the close tie between poor language skills and emotional/behavioral problems. The data strongly suggest the clinical importance and feasibility of language assessment and the significance of receptive problems in bilingual children referred for psychiatric services. A safe approach is to fully assess language skills, rather than misattributing these children's language delays to normal bilingual acquisition processes.

Idiosyncratic variation in the application of phonological processes in early bilingual acquisition

This paper reports on the early lexical acquisition of two children who acquired Spanish and English simultaneously. Classification of forms according to the use of maintenance, reduction, reduplication, and transposition strategies shows a predominance of full forms and relatively little use of reduction. These data provide strong counterevidence to Faingold's (Faingold, E.D., 1996. Variation in the application of natural processes: language-dependent constraints in the phonological acquisition of bilingual chidren. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 25, 515–526) proposal that children acquiring languages not closely related tend to favor a reduction strategy whereas those acquiring closely related languages favor a maintenance strategy.

Book Review: Bilingual Acquisition: Theoretical Implications of a Case Study.

Book Review: <i>Bilingual Acquisition: Theoretical Implications of a Case Study</i>.

Disambiguation of single noun translations extracted from bilingual comparable corpora

Bilingual machine readable dictionaries are important and indispensable resources of information for cross-language information retrieval, and machine translation. Recently, these cross-language informational activities have begun to focus on specific academic or technological domains. In this paper, we describe a bilingual dictionary acquisition system which extracts translations from non-parallel but comparable corpora of a specific academic domain and disambiguates the extracted translations. The proposed method is two-fold. At the first stage, candidate terms are extracted from a Japanese and English corpus, respectively, and ranked according to their importance as terms. At the second stage, ambiguous translations are resolved by selecting the target language translation which is the nearest in rank to the source language term. Finally, we evaluate the proposed method in an experiment.

Acquiring languages – two for the price of one?

Most language acquisition research is carried out using monolingual children but, in fact, a great many people in the world grow up speaking multiple languages. The extent to which monolingual studies truly generalize to the multilingual case is an open question: is acquiring two languages just like acquiring one, or does it involve additional and/or independent processes? Previous reports on bilingual acquisition have disagreed about whether children acquiring two languages show linguistic delays, perhaps because children initially confuse the two input languages for a single language that must later be re-organized into two separate ones.In a recent study, six bilingual children were studied from before their first words until their use of multi-word utterances1xBilingual signed and spoken language acquisition from birth: implications for the mechanisms underlying early bilingual language acquisition. Petitto, L.A. et al. J. Child Lang. 2001; 28: 453–496CrossRef | PubMed | Scopus (140)See all

Bilingual signed and spoken language acquisition from birth: implications for the mechanisms underlying early bilingual language acquisition

Divergent hypotheses exist concerning the types of knowledge underlying early bilingualism, with some portraying a troubled course marred by language delays and confusion, and others portraying one that is largely unremarkable. We studied the extraordinary case of bilingual acquisition across two modalities to examine these hypotheses. Three children acquiring Langues des Signes Québécoise and French, and three children acquiring French and English (ages at onset approximately 1;0, 2;6 and 3;6 per group) were videotaped regularly over one year while we empirically manipulated novel and familiar speakers of each child's two languages. The results revealed that both groups achieved their early linguistic milestones in each of their languages at the same time (and similarly to monolinguals), produced a substantial number of semantically corresponding words in each of their two languages from their very first words or signs (translation equivalents), and demonstrated sensitivity to the interlocutor's language by altering their language choices. Children did mix their languages to varying degrees, and some persisted in using a language that was not the primary language of the addressee, but the propensity to do both was directly related to their parents' mixing rates, in combination with their own developing language preference. The signing-speaking bilinguals did exploit the modality possibilities, and they did simultaneously mix their signs and speech, but in semantically principled and highly constrained ways. It is concluded that the capacity to differentiate between two languages is well in place prior to first words, and it is hypothesized that this capacity may result from biological mechanisms that permit the discovery of early phonological representations. Reasons why paradoxical views of bilingual acquisition have persisted are also offered.