The Bilingual Child: Early Development and

How does a child become bilingual? The answer to this intriguing question remains largely a mystery, not least because it has been far less extensively researched than the process of mastering a first language. Drawing on new studies of children exposed to two languages from birth (English and Cantonese), this book demonstrates how childhood bilingualism develops naturally in response to the two languages in the children's environment. While each bilingual child's profile is unique, the children studied are shown to develop quite differently from monolingual children. The authors demonstrate significant interactions between the children's developing grammars, as well as the important role played by language dominance in their bilingual development. Based on original research and using findings from the largest available multimedia bilingual corpus, the book will be welcomed by students and scholars working in child language acquisition, bilingualism and language contact.

Virginia Yip is Professor in Linguistics and Modern Languages at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

List of tables and figures	p. ix
Series editor's foreword	p. xii
Preface	p. xiv
Acknowledgments	p. xvii
List of abbreviations	p. xxi
Introduction	p. 1
Introduction	p. 1
Research questions	p. 5
The ecology of bilingual development	p. 7
The Hong Kong speech community	p. 9
Bilingual development and language contact	p. 12
Mechanisms of language contact	p. 14
Summary	p. 19
Overview of the book	p. 20
Theoretical framework	p. 22
Epistemological status of bilingual acquisition	p. 22
The logical problem of bilingual acquisition and the poverty of the dual stimulus	p. 30
Language differentiation in bilingual acquisition	p. 33
Language dominance in early bilingual development	p. 35
Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual development	p. 37
Input ambiguity and learnability	p. 44
Vulnerable domains in bilingual development	p. 49
Bilingual development and language contact	p. 50
Summary	p. 54
Methodology	p. 56
Methodologies in the study of bilingual acquisition	p. 56
The Hong Kong Bilingual Child Language Corpus and other data for this study	p. 63
Quantitative measures of bilingual development: language dominance and MLU differentials	p. 72
Other indicators of language dominance	p. 81
Conclusions	p. 84
Wh-interrogatives: to move or not to move?	p. 87
Wh-interrogatives in English and Cantonese	p. 88
Wh-interrogatives in bilingual children	p. 93
Emergence and order of acquisition of wh-phrases in English and Cantonese: bilingual and monolingual children compared	p. 104
Discussion: language dominance, input ambiguity and asymmetry	p. 119
Wh-in-situ in contact languages	p. 123
Conclusions	p. 126
Null objects: dual input and learnability	p. 133
Null objects in adult Cantonese	p. 134
Null objects in English: cross-linguistic influence and learnability	p. 136
Input ambiguity and language dominance	p. 147
Null objects in Singapore Colloquial English	p. 152
Conclusions	p. 152
Relative clauses: transfer and universals	p. 155
Introduction	p. 155
Development of pronominal relative clauses in the bilingual children	p. 162
The emergence of postnominal relatives in English	p. 170
Accounting for transfer	p. 174
Relative clauses in Singapore Colloquial English	p. 181
Conclusions	p. 184
Vulnerable domains in Cantonese and the directionality of transfer	p. 189
Placement of prepositional phrases in bilingual children's Cantonese	p. 190
Dative constructions with bei2 'give' in bilingual children's Cantonese	p. 200
Bidirectional transfer in verb-particle constructions in bilingual development	p. 216
Conclusions	p. 223
Bilingual development and contact-induced grammaticalization	p. 227
Contact-induced grammaticalization	p. 228
Already as marker of perfective aspect	p. 235
Give-passives and replica grammaticalization	p. 239
One as nominalizer	p. 248
Discussion	p. 251
Conclusions and implications	p. 255
Theoretical issues	p. 256
Methodological issues	p. 260
Implications for first and second language acquisition	p. 260
Implications for language contact	p. 261
Prospects for future research	p. 262
References	p. 265
Index	p. 287
Author index	p. 292
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

FREE SHIPPING

Rent More, Save More! Use code: BBRENTAL

5% off 1 book, 7% off 2 books, 10% off 3+ books

The Bilingual Child: Early Development and Language Contact

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials