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Early Bilingual Language Development

Early bilingual language development is commonly thought to involve mixing of the two languages, but the author argues this is not evidence of an undifferentiated language system. The author provides tentative evidence from speech perception studies and case studies that young bilingual children can differentiate their two languages from an early stage and use them functionally in different contexts. A unitary language system explanation of mixing is questionable without detailed documentation of the languages children are exposed to and use in different situations. The evidence suggests bilingual infants can distinguish unfamiliar languages and bilingual children can differentiate and use their language systems contextually from the beginning.

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54 views2 pages

Early Bilingual Language Development

Early bilingual language development is commonly thought to involve mixing of the two languages, but the author argues this is not evidence of an undifferentiated language system. The author provides tentative evidence from speech perception studies and case studies that young bilingual children can differentiate their two languages from an early stage and use them functionally in different contexts. A unitary language system explanation of mixing is questionable without detailed documentation of the languages children are exposed to and use in different situations. The evidence suggests bilingual infants can distinguish unfamiliar languages and bilingual children can differentiate and use their language systems contextually from the beginning.

Uploaded by

Watson Criticon
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Early bilingual language development

Adrian Camacho

What is the main purpose of the reading?

The main purpose of the reading is to question the common interpretation that infant bilingual
development tends to mix elements from their two languages is evidence for a unitary underlying
language system. The author will provide with some tentative evidence based on speech perception
studies and re-analyses of selected bilingual case studies that young bilingual children are
psycholinguistically able to differentiate two languages from the earliest stages of bilingual development
and that they can use their two languages in functionally differentiated ways, thereby providing
evidence of differentiated underlying language systems.

Bilingual mixing

 Phonological mixing in the form of loan blends


 Mixing of grammatical morphemes
 Morphological mixing
 Pragmatic mixing
 code-mixing (mix languages in the same sentence,)

This raises an important methodological issue that will be discussed in more detail later. It is necessary
to study the language models to whom bilingual children are exposed in order to understand all possible
sources of mixing. The fact that mixing of two languages occurs during bilingual development has been
reported and is accepted by all investigators. More questionable are the explanations of it.

The unitary-language system explanation

In the absence of sound and complete data on language use in different language contexts, an
explanation of bilingual mixing in terms of undifferentiated language systems is open to serious
question.

Other explanations of mixing

By far the most frequent of these is that bilingual children mix because they lack appropriate lexical
items in one language but have them in the other language and, effectively, they borrow from one
language for use in the other. Restricted use of specific lexical items and structural linguistic factors.

Developing bilingual children can be seen to be using whatever grammatical devices they have in their
repertoire or whatever devices they are able to use given their current language ability.

The role of input

Bilingual children with differentiated language systems may still mix because the input conditions permit
it or because the verbal interaction calls for it.
The unitary-language system hypothesis re-examined

 how the languages are used


 data on language use would need to be collected in different language contexts in order to
determine the relative functional distribution of elements from the two languages
 detailed documentation of the input conditions, both during specific interactional episodes and
more generally, is needed in order to correlate the incidence and type of mixed output with
mixed input

Evidence

 that infants of 6–17 weeks are able to differentiate phonetic contrasts in languages
 4-day-old infants from French-speaking families were able to discriminate between French and
Russian and that they showed a preference for French

Evidence suggests that bilingual-to-be infants are capable of discriminating between different unfamiliar
spoken languages at the point in development when they begin to utter single words.

Bilingual children are able to differentiate their language systems from the beginning and that they are
able to use their developing language systems differentially in contextually sensitive ways.

What is clear from this review is that the case for undifferentiated language development in bilingual
children is far from established.

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