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Current Perspectives on Child Language Acquisition: How children use their environment to learn
Edited by Caroline F. Rowland, Anna L. Theakston, Ben Ambridge and Katherine E. Twomey
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 27] 2020
► pp. 263–285

Lessons from studying language development in bilingual children

| University of Reading

The chapter starts by providing an overview of the many factors that contribute to children’s bilingual experience including the societal context and the social status of the two languages, the household composition and the access to native speakers, the age of first exposure, the distance between the two languages and patterns of code-switching. The second half of the chapter homes in on three areas of language development where bilingualism shapes the relationship with the input, plays a role in the relationship between processing skills and pragmatic skills, and affects representations across two languages. Within-language and across-language relationships in the first three years of word learning highlight the language-specific nature of the role of the input. The interaction between pragmatic skills, vocabulary size and lexical learning in a comparative monolingual-bilingual framework further unpack how much is language-specific in the course of early development. The final section moves beyond the lexicon to investigate the extent to which syntactic representations are shared across languages and how this affects cross-linguistic influence at the syntactic level in older pre-school children.

Article outline
  • Preface
  • Introduction
  • What do we talk about when we talk about childhood bilingualism?
  • Word learning
    • Processing efficiency, language exposure and lexical acquisition
    • Word learning and mutual exclusivity
    • Shared syntactic representations in later bilingual development
  • Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 17 September 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.27.12ser
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