Psycholinguistics of Bilingualism by Grosjean Francois; Li Ping; Li Ping & Ping Li

Author:Grosjean, Francois; Li, Ping; Li, Ping & Ping Li
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
Published: 2012-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

6.2.1 Language Pairs

Among the many possible permutations, some language pairs are genetically and/or typologically distant, while some are closer. If the languages being acquired are genetically related and/or have a history of contact, there will be cognate lexical items, such as German mein and Swedish min “my.” Such cognates may facilitate, hinder or otherwise affect development: they are thought to function as triggers for code-mixing, for example (Kootstra, Van Hell, & Dijkstra, 2012). If the languages share typological affinities, there will be points of structural overlap between them, which may be loci of code-mixing and/or cross-linguistic influence. For example, Chinese and Japanese have similar prenominal relative clauses, which can influence each other developmentally (Yabuki-Soh, 2007). Chinese and English are both SVO languages with several points of overlap which facilitate syntactic transfer (Yip & Matthews, 2007, p. 208). Conversely, typologically distant pairs such as English and Japanese have relatively few points of overlap. This may be a factor in the lack of cross-linguistic influence observed in studies of Japanese-English development such as Mishina-Mori (2002), since structural overlap appears to be a prerequisite for transfer (Hulk & Müller, 2000; see also Chapter 7).

Just as English and other Indo-European languages are over-represented in linguistics at large, so in bilingual development an overwhelming number of studies include English as one of the target languages, while an even higher percentage involves one or more European languages. For example, among five seminal studies of the 1980s cited by De Houwer (2009, p. 13), the language pairs involved were German–French, French–English, Norwegian–English, Spanish–English, and Dutch–English. This is far from being a representative sample, and it may have given us an incomplete picture of aspects of bilingual development. Childhood bilingualism will be better understood when investigated against a rich background of linguistic diversity, extending the database from pairing English and European languages to typologically unrelated languages with very different structures. For example, properties of Chinese such as lexical tone, topic prominence, word order, classifiers, and null arguments raise new possibilities for interaction between a child’s developing linguistic systems (Yip & Matthews, 2010).

In practice, the choice of a language pair to be studied is usually determined by the availability of participants (as in the case of parent-researchers) and other practical concerns. In order to make original contributions, such studies need to be designed to exploit the properties of the language pair being acquired. Another requirement is to consider the development of both languages. Studies of bilingual children have often focused on one language, such as English in the case of immigrant children. To provide a fuller picture of bilingual acquisition in such cases, aspects of both English and the home language should be investigated since both languages are developing concurrently.

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