Input and Experience in Bilingual Development.

Amount of exposure has been observed to affect the linguistic development of bilingual children in a variety of domains. As yet, however, relatively few studies have compared the acquisition across domains within the same group of children. Such a comparative approach is arguably essential to gain a...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator: Grüter, Theres.
Other Authors / Creators:Paradis, Johanne.
Format: eBook Electronic
Language:English
Imprint: Amsterdam : John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014.
Series:Trends in Language Acquisition Research
Subjects:
Local Note:Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2022. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
Online Access:Click to View
Description
Summary:Amount of exposure has been observed to affect the linguistic development of bilingual children in a variety of domains. As yet, however, relatively few studies have compared the acquisition across domains within the same group of children. Such a comparative approach is arguably essential to gain a more complete understanding of input effects in bilingual acquisition. Most studies in this area concentrate on the acquisition of vocabulary and grammar/morphosyntax; the bilingual acquisition of linguistic properties involving the interaction between syntax and semantics remains under-investigated. The present study seeks to address these gaps by examining - within the same group of English/Dutch bilinguals - the acquisition of linguistic properties taken from two different domains, namely gender-marking on definite determiners, a morphosyntactic property of Dutch with a considerable lexical component, and the acquisition of meaning restrictions on different word orders (scrambling), a property involving both compositional semantic and syntactic processes. The results show input effects for gender but not for scrambling. This is argued to be in line with approaches to acquisition which assume scrambling to constitute a poverty of the stimulus problem, but problematic for those approaches where input plays a more central role.
Children acquiring two languages, either simultaneously or sequentially, have more variation in their linguistic input than their monolingual peers. Understanding the nature and consequences of this variability has been the focus of much recent research on childhood bilingualism. This volume constitutes the first collection of research solely dedicated to the topic of input in childhood bilingualism. Chapters represent a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of childhood bilingualism, covering a variety of language combinations and sociocultural contexts in Europe, Israel, North and South America. As a reflection of the field's current understanding of the intricate relationship between experience and development in children growing up with two or more languages, this volume will be of interest to scholars and practitioners working with bi- and multilingual learners in various sociolinguistic and educational contexts.
Item Description:Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.
Physical Description:1 online resource (214 pages)
ISBN:9789027269454