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To appear in Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 2013 Current issues in multilingual first language acquisition Sharon Unsworth ABSTRACT Multilingual first language acquisition refers to the language development of children exposed to two or more languages from birth or shortly thereafter. Much of the research on this topic adopts a comparative approach. Bilinguals are thus compared with their monolingual peers, and trilinguals with both bilinguals and monolinguals; within children, comparisons are made between a child’s two (or more) languages, and between different domains within those languages. The goal of such comparisons is to determine the extent to which language development proceeds along similar paths and/or at a similar rate across groups, languages and domains, in order to elaborate upon the question of whether these different groups acquire language in the same way, and to evaluate how language development in multilingual settings is influenced by environmental factors. The answers to these questions have both theoretical and practical implications. The goal of this article is to discuss the results of some of this recent research on multilingual first language acquisition, by reviewing (i) properties of the developing linguistic system in a variety of linguistic domains, and (ii) some of the characteristics of multilingual first language acquisition which have attracted attention over the past five years, including crosslinguistic influence, dominance and input quantity/quality. Trilingual first language acquisition is covered in a dedicated section. 1

INTRODUCTION Worldwide, children growing up with more than one language are in the majority (Tucker, 1998), and increasing international mobility means that this fact is unlikely to change. For many children, exposure to a second language occurs once the first is already well established, whereas for others, the acquisition of two or more languages occurs (more or less) simultaneously. It is this latter situation, which we shall refer to as multilingual first language acquisition, which is the topic of this review. Much of the research on multilingual first language acquisition asks whether the acquisition of multiple first languages follows the same path and time course as the acquisition of just one. The answer to this question has both theoretical and practical implications. From a practical point of view, knowing what ‘typical’ multilingual acquisition looks like and how this differs from ‘typical’ monolingual acquisition is important in determining how to best educate children growing up with more than one language, how best to assess potential language learning disabilities in this group and where necessary, how to determine appropriate interventions. From a theoretical perspective, the circumstances in which multiple languages are acquired differ in crucial ways from those of monolingual acquisition, and comparing the two and the extent to which they affect children’s language development can shed light on important theoretical questions such as the role of input in language acquisition and how it interacts with the mechanisms driving the language acquisition process. This review surveys research on multilingual first language acquisition conducted over the past five years (see Yip, 2013 for a review of similar issues in simultaneous bilingual acquisition). In general, it is restricted to children acquiring more than one language before the age of three, which is often considered a dividing line between simultaneous and successive bilingual acquisition (Genesee, Paradis, & Crago, 2004; McLaughlin, 1978; but 2

see e.g., De Houwer, 1995 for a stricter definition). The focus is on studies conducted from a linguistic or psychological perspective, and on research addressing children’s language development while children rather than the ultimate level of attainment they reach as adults. The review is divided into two parts. The first concerns comparisons between multilingual and monolingual acquisition in terms of rate of acquisition and error types and is organised according to linguistic domain, and the second considers characteristics specific to the multilingual acquisition context, such as dominance and crosslinguistic influence. As we shall see, most of the available research deals with bilingual rather than trilingual acquisition; as such, the studies on trilingual acquisition are grouped together in the final section of the second part. This review will show that there are both areas in which multilingual first language acquisition is similar to monolingual first language acquisition, such as the use of the same perceptual biases in early phonetic and phonological acquisition, as well as clear differences, such as rate of acquisition of vocabulary. Factors such as crosslinguistic influence, dominance and differences in input quantity and quality have been put forward as explanations for these findings. MULTILINGUAL FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IN DIFFERENT DOMAINS The focus of this section is the extent to which language development in multilingual first language acquisition is quantitatively and qualitatively similar to that of monolingual first language acquisition. It covers each of the following linguistic domains: phonetics and phonology, vocabulary, morphosyntax and semantics/pragmatics. Phonetics and phonology Much of the recent research on multilingual first language acquisition concerns the developing perceptual abilities of bilingual infants (see Sebastián-Gallés, 2010; Werker & 3

Byers-Heinlein, 2008; Werker, 2012 for overviews), with comparatively few studies on phonological development in early and later childhood (Fabiano-Smith & Barlow, 2010). One of the first tasks facing children growing up in a multilingual setting is to distinguish and separate the speech input to which they are exposed into two (or more) languages, i.e., language discrimination. A well-established finding from earlier research in this area is that monolingual and bilingual infants show similar patterns of sensitivity to perceptual cues provided by a language’s rhythmicity, 1 that is, they are able to discriminate languages from different rhythmic classes at birth (e.g., Ramus, Hauser, Miller, Morris, & Mehler, 2000) and at around 4 – 5 months, they can also discriminate languages from the same rhythmic class (e.g., Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés, 2001). Furthermore, it has been observed that at birth, monolingual infants are better able to discriminate their native language from an unfamiliar language than they are able to discriminate two unfamiliar languages (e.g., Mehler et al., 1988). In a recent study comparing bilingual (English-Tagalog) and monolingual (English) infants, Byers-Heinlein, Burns and Werker (2010) demonstrate that similar behaviour exists for bilinguals. More specifically, in a preferential listening task, these authors observe that newborn infants exposed to bilingual speech in utero demonstrated the ability to discriminate between the two languages spoken by the mother during pregnancy, but they did not show a preference for one over the other, listening to the two equally well (cf. monolinguals, who prefer their native language over an unfamiliar language). As the authors note, not only do these findings provide evidence that the process of bilingual acquisition has already started at birth, they also show that in the very earliest stages of language development, bilingual and monolingual children make use of the same perceptual biases (i.e., rhythm). Bilingual children have also been found to make use of certain cues used to discriminate language, namely facial movement, for longer than 1 The world’s languages are traditionally divided into three rhythmic classes: stress-timed (e.g., Dutch), syllable- timed (e.g., French) and mora-timed (e.g., Japanese). 4

monolinguals (Sebastián-Gallés, Albareda-Castellot, Weikum, & Werker, in press; Weikum et al., 2007). After discriminating between their two languages, children subsequently need to discriminate the relevant phonetic categories within each language. One frequently cited result from earlier research is that when acquiring two highly similar languages, bilingual infants experience a temporary delay around age 8 months when, unlike monolinguals, they are unable to perceive certain vowel contrasts e.g., /e/ vs. / / in Catalan (Bosch & Sebastián- ɛ Gallés, 2003). Frequency of input and degree of overlap between phonetic ranges have been put forward as possible explanations for these findings, with the authors suggesting that the considerably higher frequency of the Spanish vowel /e/, which is phonetically very similar to the two Catalan vowels, leads to a temporary inability to make the distinction in Catalan. More recent research on bilingual discrimination of consonants has however challenged the generalisability of this finding, with at least two studies showing that bilinguals are able to perceive distinctions or phonemes which are realised in both languages in similar but crucially, slightly different ways at the same age as monolinguals (Burns, Yoshida, Hill, & Werker, 2007; Sundara, Polka, & Molnar, 2008). The authors of both of these studies speculate that frequency of occurrence and distribution patterns may play a role in determining the timing of bilingual perceptual reorganisation (but see Sebastián-Gallés & Bosch, 2009). Interestingly, in a more recent article, Sebastián-Gallés and colleagues have presented evidence from an anticipatory eye movement paradigm which suggests that contrary to their previous findings, bilingual Catalan-Spanish children are able to discriminate the /e/-/ / contrast in Catalan, i.e., the familiarisation-preference procedure in ɛ previous studies may have concealed bilingual children’s real abilities (Albareda-Castellot, Pons, & Sebastián-Gallés, 2011). 5

We now turn to the phonological development of older bilingual children, an area which has not been widely investigated (but see Holm & Dodd, 1999; Lleó & Kehoe, 2002). The limited number of recent studies have largely focussed on two issues, namely whether the bilingual acquisition of speech sounds follows the same time course as for monolinguals and whether there is any evidence for transfer or crosslinguistic influence. In a study on the production of consonants in Spanish and English, Fabiano-Smith and Goldstein (2010) find that while bilingual English-Spanish 3 year olds showed a comparable rate of development to their monolingual peers in English, in Spanish they were slower. This difference was however limited to just a few manner classes, namely trills e.g., /r/, fricatives e.g., /s/, and glides e.g., /w/, with other classes evidencing no differences between bilinguals and monolinguals. The authors speculate that bilingual children may be using their phonological knowledge in one language to facilitate their acquisition in the other, allowing them to acquire the two within the same timeframe as monolinguals. In a study on Russian- English bilingual children, Gildersleeve-Neumann and Wright (2010) find that bilingual children demonstrate the same level of complexity as monolinguals in their phonetic inventories of consonants (where relevant data are available; see also Fabiano-Smith & Barlow, 2010), but they make more errors with vowels, a pattern which is reminiscent of some of the aforementioned studies concerning bilingual children’s early perceptual development. These studies also find evidence – albeit limited in some cases – of crosslinguistic influence. For example, Gildersleeve-Neumann and Wright (2010) observe transfer of final devoicing from Russian to English, irrespective of the child’s specific bilingual environment, and two of the eight bilingual children in the Fabiano-Smith and Goldstein (2010) study produce de-aspirated stops in English as a result of influence from Spanish (see also 6

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