Autonomous and interdependent development of two language systems in Japanese/English simultaneous bilinguals: Evidence from question formation

Abstract

The recent finding that two languages develop autonomously in young simultaneous bilinguals has been challenged by several researchers. The current study attempts to show that both independence and interdependence are involved in early bilingual development. Longitudinal analysis of the acquisition of question formation was conducted in two Japanese/English bilingual children. The results indicate that the development of the two grammars is basically autonomous, but cross-language effects are also present, although not in both children. It is suggested that cross-linguistic cue competition best captures the transfer process, and that linguistic environment for each child may be the source of individual differences in the use of cross-linguistic structures. Implications of the current results for language acquisition theories are discussed.

Keywords

Bilingual first language acquisition child grammar Competition Model Independent Development Hypothesis interrogatives naturalistic data syntactic development word order

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Bates, E. & MacWhinney, B. (1987). Competition, variation, and language learning. In B. MacWhinney (Ed.), The mechanisms of language acquisition (pp. 157-193). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum .

Bellugi, U. (1965). The development of interrogative structures in children’s speech. In K. Reigel (Ed.), The development of language functions (pp. 103-138). University of Michigan Language Development Program , Report No. 8.

Bellugi, U. (1971). Simplification in children’s language. In R. Huxley & E. Ingram (Eds), Language acquisition: Models and methods ( London: Academic Press ).

Bergman, C. (1976). Interference vs. independent development in infant bilingualism. In G. Keller et al. (Eds), Bilingualism in the bicentennial and beyond (pp. 86-95). New York: Bilingual Press, Editorial Bilingue .

Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press .

Clancy, P. (1985). The acquisition of Japanese. In D. Slobin (Ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition. Vol. 1: The data (pp. 373-524). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum .

De Houwer, A. (1990). The acquisition of two languages from birth: A case study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .

De Houwer, A. (1995). Bilingual language acquisition. In P. Fletcher & B. MacWhinney (Eds), The handbook of child language (pp. 219-250). Oxford: Basil Blackwell .

de Villiers, J. & de Villiers, P. (1985). The acquisition of English. In D. Slobin (Ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition. Vol. 1: The data (pp. 27-119). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum .

10.

Dopke, S. (1998). Competing language structures: The acquisition of verb placement by bilingual German-English children . Journal of Child Language, 25, 555-584 .

11.

Dopke, S. (1999). Cross-linguistic influences on the placement of negation and modal particles in simultaneous bilingualism . Language Sciences, 21, 143-175 .

12.

Erreich, A. (1980). The acquisition of inversion in Wh-questions: What evidence the child uses? [sic] Unpublished PhD thesis, Department of Psychology, City University of New York.

13.

Fodor, J. D. (1998). Unambiguous triggers . Linguistic Inquiry, 29, 1-36 .

14.

Gawlitzek-Maiwald, I. & Tracy, R. (1996). Bilingual bootstrapping . Linguistics, 34, 901-926 .

15.

Gawlitzek-Maiwald, I. , Tracy, R. & Fritzenschaft, A. (1992). Language acquisition and competing linguistic representations: The child as arbiter. In J. M. Meisel (Ed.), The acquisition of verb placement: Functional categories and V2 phenomena in language development (pp. 139-179). Dordrecht: Kluwer .

16.

Genesee, F. (1989). Early bilingual development: One language or two? Journal of Child Language, 16, 161-179 .

17.

Hulk, A. C. (1997). The acquisition of French object pronouns by a Dutch/French bilingual child . In A. Sorace et al. (Eds), Proceedings of GALA 1997: Language acquisition: Knowledge representation and processing (pp. 512-526 ). Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.

18.

Hulk, A. C. & van der Linden, E. (1996). Language mixing in a French-Dutch bilingual child. In E. Kellerman , B. Weltens & T. Borgaerts (Eds), EUROSLA 6, A selection of papers (pp. 89-103). Amsterdam: VU University Press .

19.

Ingram, D. & Tyack, D. (1979). Inversion of subject NP and Aux in children’s questions . Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 4, 333-341 .

20.

Klima, E. S. & Bellugi, U. (1966). Syntactic regularities in the speech of children. In J. Lyons & R. J. Wales (Eds), Psycholinguistic papers (pp. 183-207). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press . Summarized in Erreich (1980).

21.

Lanza, E. (1990) .Language mixing in infant bilingualism: A sociolinguistic perspective. Unpublished PhD thesis, Department of Linguitstics, Georgetown University.

22.

Lanza, E. (1992). Can bilingual two-year-olds code-switch? Journal of Child Language, 19, 633-658 .

23.

Lindholm, K. J. & Padilla, A. (1978a). Language mixing in bilingual children . Journal of Child Language, 5, 327-335 .

24.

Lindholm, K. J. & Padilla, A. (1978b). Child bilingualism: Report on language mixing, switching and translations . Linguistics, 211, 23-44 .

25.

MacWhinney, B. (1987). The Competition Model. In B. MacWhinney (Ed.), The mechanisms of language acquisition (pp. 249-308). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum .

26.

MacWhinney, B. (1995). The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum .

27.

MacWhinney, B. (1997). Second language acquisition and the Competition Model. In A. de Groot & J. F. Kroll (Eds), Tutorials in bilingualism: Psychological perspectives (pp. 113-124). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum .

28.

Meisel, J. M. (1989). Early differentiation of languages in bilingual children. In K. Hyltenstam & L. Obler (Eds), Bilingualism across the lifespan: Aspects of acquisition, maturity and loss (pp. 13-41). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .

29.

Meisel, J. M. (1990). INFL-ection: Subjects and subject-verb agreement. In J. Meisel (Ed.), Two first languages: Early grammatical development in bilingual children (pp. 237-298). Province, RI: Foris Publications .

30.

Meisel, J. M. (1994). Code-switching in young bilingual children: The acquisition of grammatical constraints . Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 16, 413-439 .

31.

Minami, M. & Morikawa, H. (1995). Mein rain ni donoyouni keitaiso wo hyouki suru ka [How to mark morphemes on the main line]. In Y. Oshima-Takane & B. MacWhiny (Eds), CHILDES manual for Japanese (pp. 73-91). Montreal: McGill University .

32.

Mishina-Mori, S. (2002). Language differentiation of the two languages in early bilingual development: A case study of Japanese/English bilingual children . International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 40(3), 211-233 .

33.

Muller, N. (1998). Transfer in bilingual first language acquisition . Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1(3), 151-171 .

34.

Nicoladis, E. M. (1995). Code-mixing in young bilingual children. Unpublished PhD thesis, Department of Psychology, McGill University.

35.

Okubo, A. (1967). Yooji gengo no hattatsu [The development of children’s language]. Tokyo: Tokyodoo .

36.

Oshima-Takane, Y. & MacWhinney, B. (1995). CHILDES manual for Japanese. Montreal: McGill University .

37.

Padilla, A. & Liebman, E. (1975). Language acquisition in the bilingual child . The Bilingual Review, 2, 34-55 .

38.

Paradis, J. & Genesee, F. (1996). Syntactic acquisition in bilingual children: Autonomous or interdependent? Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 18, 1-25 .

39.

Parodi, T. (1990). The acquisition of word order regularities and case morphology. In J. Meisel (Ed.), Two first languages: Early grammatical development in bilingual children (pp. 57-190) Province, RI: Foris Publications .

40.

Redlinger, W. E. & Park, T. (1980). Language mixing in young bilinguals . Journal of Child Language, 7, 337-352 .

41.

Sinka, I. (2000). The search for cross-linguistic influences in the language of young Latvian-English bilinguals. In S. Dopke (Ed.), Cross-linguistic structures in simultaneous bilingualism (pp. 149-174). Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins .

42.

Sinka, I. & Schelletter, C. (1998). Morphosyntactic development in bilingual children . International Journal of Bilingualism, 2(3), 301-326 .

43.

Snow, C. E. (1972). Mother’s speech to children learning language . Child Development, 43, 549-565 .

44.

Vihman, M. (1985). Language differentiation by the bilingual infant . Journal of Child Language, 12, 297-324 .

45.

Volterra, V. & Taeschner, T. (1978). The acquisition and development of language by bilingual children . Journal of Child Language, 5, 311-326 .

46.

Yamada, A. (1980). The development of syntactic devices for communication in the early stages of the acquisition of Japanese: A case study. Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Hawaii.