Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Symbols and abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Bilingual first language acquisition: methods and theories
- 3 A new study of bilingual first language acquisition: aims and hypotheses
- 4 Case study of a bilingual child: introduction
- 5 Language choice and Mixed utterances
- 6 The noun phrase
- 7 The verb phrase
- 8 Syntactic analysis
- 9 The morphological and syntactic analyses: a recapitulation
- 10 Metalinguistic behaviour
- 11 Findings and implications
- References
- Appendix
- Index of names
3 - A new study of bilingual first language acquisition: aims and hypotheses
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Symbols and abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Bilingual first language acquisition: methods and theories
- 3 A new study of bilingual first language acquisition: aims and hypotheses
- 4 Case study of a bilingual child: introduction
- 5 Language choice and Mixed utterances
- 6 The noun phrase
- 7 The verb phrase
- 8 Syntactic analysis
- 9 The morphological and syntactic analyses: a recapitulation
- 10 Metalinguistic behaviour
- 11 Findings and implications
- References
- Appendix
- Index of names
Summary
The conclusion of section 2.2 in Chapter 2 made the point that at the moment we lack sufficiently detailed knowledge about the ‘base-line’ of bilingual development. The empirical investigation to be presented in the remainder of this book hopes to rectify this situation somewhat.
The new data to be investigated comprise a detailed case study of a child exposed to English and Dutch from birth onwards. The fact that one of the child's languages is Dutch contributes to the diversification needed in this field, since Dutch is a language hitherto not studied in the field of BFLA. Although we have not been as ambitious as Taeschner (1983), who reports on her daughters' language development over several years, and have limited ourselves to a relatively short age period as a basis for investigation (viz. the 8 months between the ages of 2;7 and 3;4), it is hoped that the level of detail and the thoroughness of the analyses can make up for this lack of temporal scope.
It should be stressed that the English-Dutch bilingual child who is the subject of the case study to be presented was exposed to her two languages in a separate fashion: she heard Dutch from one set of interlocutors, and English from another. Any hypotheses or other theoretical points made in the following are intended to apply to such a separate input situation only.
In the analyses, the emphasis will be on morphosyntactic development.
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- Information
- The Acquisition of Two Languages from BirthA Case Study, pp. 65 - 70Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990