Much of the scholarly literature in second language acquisition relates language development with different cognitive, sociocultural, and linguistic factors, but little research relates second language acquisition to affect. This paucity of research is especially relevant in the case of immigrant populations, for whom there is a possibility of discontinuity of affective ties referent to their extended families left in the native land. In this chapter we aim to understand interconnections between the development of multilingualism and biliteracy for young children who are first-generation Americans, and the composition of digital picture books to evoke affective experiences relative to remote eco-social environments.

In this chapter we explore the perceptions and practices of US bilingual or multilingual families with young children, focusing mostly on research with families from Latin American backgrounds and paying close attention to the intersection of language, culture and emotion. We describe who is bi or multilingual in the US, examine why and how US families choose to raise children bi or multilingually, and explore how families use their multiple languages as a child-rearing strategy.

Growing up multilingually and in a multilingual social environment affects the acquisition of literacy. Many multilingual children learn to read and write in the language required by the institutional context. This is often a second, sometimes unfamiliar, language for them and it is the dominant language of the society they live in. However, these children might also learn, or be in contact with, other written languages used in their families and communities. The practices in all written languages vary, and family or community languages and literacies might be typologically close or distant from the language and literacy practices expected at school, which is the main institution for literacy acquisition. Unfolding the resources and needs of multilingual children’s literacy acquisition is at the center of this chapter. The contexts of literacy acquisition in multilingual societies is presented on three different levels: by defining literacy and literacies, by presenting different multilingual and multiliterate contexts, and by zooming in on one aspect of literacy, that is, spelling.

This chapter discusses the notion of “homescape” and the role of material homescapes showcasing visible linguistic resources in general, and games and toys more specifically, in the development of the multilingual child. This contribution offers a state of the art regarding the constitution and perception of the linguistic landscapes of infancy and the linguistic, cognitive, affective, social and identity affordances provided by them. We focus particularly on: (i) the multilingual resources of multilingual families and communities engaged with the transmission and maintenance of heritage languages (and therefore involved in multiliteracy practices); (ii) children’s, families’ and educators’ perceptions of multilingual settings and resources available at home; and (iii) their practices and agency within such settings, in order to foster children’s language awareness and literacy across languages. A review of methodologies employed to research homescapes will be critically discussed and a research agenda is outlined, in terms of both potential themes and methodologies.

This chapter deals with how children reflect upon their linguistic repertoire, their language use and their lived experience of language. It draws on art-based approaches, mainly on the presentation and discussion of children’s language portraits. Language portraits have been employed for many years in educational settings as language awareness activities, as well as in research on multilingualism, calling on multilinguals to visualize their linguistic repertoire by coloring in the template of an empty body silhouette and to comment on their drawing. A close reading of language portraits produced in different workshops by children 6 to 11 years old shows that they perceive their multilingual repertoires less in terms of competences that they ‘have’ than in terms of ‘doing’ things with language, on being able to relate with others and position themselves with regard to established, sometimes competing language ideologies present in their immediate environment.

The chapter begins with a review of foundational studies on how monolingual children develop emergent literacy, then moves to explore how children develop multiliteracy by learning to interpret symbols and icons in their immediate contexts. The research shows that children find ways to experience and construct meaning from their local scripts in each of their multiple languages. Studies presented in this chapter show that children can interpret symbols in several different scripts, and that they find strategies to navigate multiple languages and become competent speakers in their communities.

Chapter 16 examines the processing of three types of long-distance dependencies: a forward syntactic dependency, a backward syntactic dependency, and a backward referential dependency. First, backward syntactic and referential dependencies show a processing asymmetry of subject/object gap sentences similar to that seen in forward syntactic dependencies, and they all elicit similar brain responses (Kwon 2008; Kwon et al. 2010, 2013). However, given that views among some typologists that backward dependencies are much more limited in distribution (Dryer 1992) and subject to more linguistic constraints (Lakoff 1968; Kuno 1972; Mittwoch 1983) than forward dependencies, processing of a backward dependency may be more difficult or less efficient (cf., Hawkins 1994, 1999, 2004). Likewise, the parser is “more cautious” in the processing of referential dependencies (Kwon and Sturt 2014). Finally, dependency formation may be affected by the relative importance of linguistic cues in a given language. In Korean, dependency formation is more strongly motivated by discourse context than in English (Kwon and Sturt 2013).

Chapter 29 examines the recurring attributes in current definitions of HL learners. These include early and significant exposure to the HL, proficiency in the HL, bilingualism to some degree, dominance in a language other than the HL, and an ethnic/cultural connection to the HL. From sociolinguistic journey, Korean heritage language (KHL) learners often end up with high receptive language skill, low to moderate accuracy in their speaking, and zero metalinguistic knowledge, and consequently enroll in Korean language in college to (re)learn their HL language. This poses pedagogical challenges, as KHL learners are linguistically distinguished from L2 learners due to their language experience. This chapter explores issues in language acquisition, language attrition, and language processing of Korean-English bilingual children and how such experience sheds light in understanding the pedagogical issues related to the language processing of young adult KHL learners.

Chapter 2 discusses some of the most salient and yet persistently controversial and significant phenomena in Korean phonology: lenis obstruent voicing, stop neutralization, consonant cluster simplification, consonant assimilation, consonantal fortition, Saisiot, vowel deletion and insertion, vowel devoicing and assimilation, monophthongization, vowel harmony, and sound symbolism. The chapter focuses on the Seoul Standard Dialect. One salient and recurrent theme is the theoretical issue of the relative strength of each sound, both inherent and in its environment. Some sounds are held to be “stronger” than others; we see that these sounds are exploited not only in sound symbolism but also in the application or non-application of certain rules. Boundaries play a significant role in Korean phonology and are analyzed as prosodic units in contemporary analyses. The Korean-specific basis of articulation, particularly obligatory unreleasing, results in many interesting weakening effects, including consonant cluster simplification, various assimilatory phenomena, and various consonant and vowel insertions by backward generalizations.

This chapter takes a critical approach to what we know about the role of the input in multilingual development in early childhood. We include a historical background on competing theoretical approaches to language acquisition in which we argue that usage-based approaches gained traction through the attention paid to input in multilingual acquisition studies. However, in reviewing such studies we draw attention to the limitations of their focus on parental rather than community input. We also draw attention to the need to go beyond the binary distinction of simultaneous and successive acquisition and take into account more fully the child’s age of acquisition in relation to the development of specific areas of language. We review the findings on the link between code-switching or mixing in the input and child productions, pointing out the range of different methodological approaches in identifying mixing. We advocate a more child-centred approach in which the morphosyntactic frame of the child’s utterance is taken into account, and illustrate this with our own study. Finally we argue that future studies should include full ethnographic information about the community setting in which multilingual acquisition takes place.