Synopses & Reviews
Examines the early linguistic development of children bilingual in English and Cantonese.
Synopsis
Compared to mastering a single language, the process of becoming bilingual in a child's first few years of life has been much less comprehensively studied, and therefore remains all the more enigmatic and intriguing. This book presents a series of case studies in early bilingual development involving a so far largely unstudied and divergent pair of languages, Cantonese and English. This intimate account is presented through the author's dual perspectives as parent-researchers continuously observing and participating in their own children's bilingual experience, and demonstrates how childhood bilingualism develops naturally in response to the two languages in their environment. Though each bilingual child's linguistic and cultural background as well as developmental profile is unique, the children studied are shown to go through a developmental process quite different from that of monolingual children. This interdisciplinary work will be of interest to scholars and students of psycholinguistics, developmental psychology and bilingualism.
Synopsis
How does a child become bilingual? 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.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction; 2. Theoretical framework; 3. Methodology; 4. Wh-interrogatives: to move or not to move?; 5. Null objects: dual input and learnability; 6. Relative clauses: transfer and universals; 7. Vulnerable domains and the directionality of transfer; 8. Bilingual development and contact-induced grammaticalization; 9. Conclusions.