Current issues in bilingual first language acquisition Stephen Matthews |
Recent studies of early bilingual development have shown that children have separate systems for each language rather than a single system. Whether and how these systems interact, however, is a matter of current debate: when does interaction occur, and what determines the direction of interaction? A longitudinal study of six children acquiring Cantonese and English simultaneously shows interaction in several grammatical domains. Language dominance is shown to be a factor: wh-questions, null objects and relative clauses are transferred from Cantonese to English in Cantonese-dominant children. Interactions involving influence of English in Cantonese are attributed to properties of the Cantonese input. One implication of these findings is that language-specific properties as well as individual variables such as language dominance determine the nature of interaction between the children’s developing language systems. |