First Language Acquisition

When children talk, they adopt the language of the community they are growing up in. But many communities make use of more than one language or more than one dialect. In these communities, children have to choose, whenever they talk, which language to speak. Their choices can depend on the family role, gender, status, power, and age of the interlocutor, as well as on the topic. Their choices also depend on such factors as social class, since that in turn may affect decisions about when to use each language, and who to, in specific settings.

Choosing a language, just like choosing a speech style, reflects in part what the speaker shares as common ground with the addressee. How, then, does learning two languages – or two dialects – differ from learning just one? Growing up in a multilingual community results in the learning of not just one language, but two or more, either at the same time or within a few years of each other. What effect does exposure to more than one language have on the process and general course of acquisition? Are there differences in the road followed by bilingual versus monolingual children? In this chapter, the focus is on the social factors that affect choices of language and dialect. I first consider bilingualism in general, and then look at some of the social and cognitive issues for children learning two (or more) languages as they advance from babbling to words to constructions. I then consider children learning two dialects, a situation rather similar to that of two languages, and end with discussion of how each choice of language affects how one represents and talks about events.

Bilingualism

Much more of the world is bilingual or multilingual than monolingual. Most people grow up speaking two or more languages (Grosjean 1982). And those not exposed to two languages from birth frequently start learning their second language when they enter school, with other languages coming later during the school years (Bialystok 2001; Bialystok & Hakuta 1994; McLaughlin 1984). Even in the United States, where the emphasis tends to be on English, with the assumption of a monolingual population, the census statistics for 2010 show that there were over 60 million speakers over age five (out of 291 million) who reported speaking a language other than English at home.