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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
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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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Gildersleeve-Neumann, Kester, David, & Peña, 2008 for more extensive evidence of transfer
from Spanish to English in Spanish-English bilingual children).
To summarise, recent research into the phonetic and phonological abilities of bilingual
children suggests that they are sensitive to language exposure
in utero
, and that they make
use of the same perceptual biases as monolingual children. There is however some evidence
for a slower rate of differentiation of certain language-specific contrasts amongst bilingual
infants and for crosslinguistic influence in the phonological development of bilingual
children. By and large, however, the perceptual and phonological development of bilingual
children is similar to that of monolinguals.
Vocabulary
Within the recent research on the multilingual first language acquisition of vocabulary there
have broadly speaking been two main areas of interest: (i) the very earliest stages of word
learning and the extent to which bilingual children make use of the same types of constraints
and phonetic detail to acquire words as monolingual children (see e.g., Vihman, Thierry,
Lum, Keren-Portnoy, & Martin, 2007), and (ii) children’s subsequent vocabulary growth and
the factors which modulate this.
A frequently studied constraint in early vocabulary acquisition is
mutual exclusivity
,
the assumption that each object category must have a different label. This word-learning bias
essentially means that when presented with a novel word in the context of one familiar and
one unfamiliar object, children assume the intended referent to be the unfamiliar object;
mutual exclusivity has been observed in monolingual children at age 17 months (Halberda,
2003) but there is little agreement as to its developmental origin (Werker, 2012). The results
of two recent studies with bilingual and trilingual children suggest that this constraint is not
as prominent in multilingual first language acquisition (Byers-Heinlein & Werker, 2009;
7
Houston-Price, Caloghiris, & Raviglione, 2010). More specifically, it has been claimed that
mutual exclusivity may be a developmental bias which emerges in monolinguals as the result
of experience with one-to-one mappings: children growing up with more than one language
are consistently exposed to more than one label for the same referent and consequently, fail to
develop this bias, or at least do not employ it to the same degree as monolinguals.
Interestingly, Byers-Heinlein and Werker (2009) find the degree to which the multilingual
children in their study made use of mutual exclusivity varied according to the number of
languages which the child was learning, i.e., whereas marginal use of this bias was detected
for bilinguals, for trilinguals it was not observed at all.
A fundamental building block in the development of the lexicon is the ability to
associate a word and object. Typically, studies of this kind employ a so-called Switch word
learning task, where infants are first habituated to two word-object combinations (Word A –
Object A, Word B – Object B) and subsequently tested in a trial where one of these
combinations is switched (e.g., Word A – Object B) to determine the extent to which they
have learned the relevant associative link. Recent research in this domain has shown that
bilinguals develop associative word learning with dissimilar words (e.g.,
pok
and
lif
) at the
same age as monolinguals, namely around 14 months (Byers-Heinlein, Fennell, & Werker, in
press), whereas when similar-sounding words (e.g.,
bih
and
dih
) are employed, bilingual
children successfully complete the task about 3 months later than monolinguals, namely at 20
months of age (Fennell, Byers-Heinlein, & Werker, 2007).
This latter finding has however
been challenged: Mattock, Polka, Rvachew and Krehm (2010) have shown that when tested
using stimuli which are representative of their language learning environment, i.e., stimuli
which include variants from both languages, bilingual children
do
demonstrate associative
word learning with similar-sounding words, illustrating the importance of taking the bilingual
8
child’s language learning environment into account not only in the analysis of experimental
results but also in the experimental design.
One well-established finding in the literature on bilingual children’s lexical
development is that while overall vocabulary levels between bilingual preschoolers and their
monolingual peers are comparable, when their languages are considered separately, bilingual
children typically score below age-appropriate norms for monolingual children on tasks of
receptive vocabulary such as the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Task (PPVT, Dunn & Dunn,
2007; Pearson, Fernández, & Oller, 1993; Pearson, Fernández, Lewedeg, & Oller, 1997). This
finding has been attributed to the
distributed characteristic
of bilingual language learning,
i.e., children typically acquire their two (or more) languages in different contexts, often with
one language restricted to use at home, and thus it is unsurprising that the words they know in
a given language are generally restricted to the context in which thy acquire that language
(Oller, Pearson, & Cobo-Lewis, 2007).
In light of this, Bialystok, Luk, Peets and Yang (2010) conducted a large-scale study
children between the ages of three and ten years old to determine whether the aforementioned
bilingual-monolingual differences were also found across a wider age range and a larger
number of children (n=1738).
In short, their results indicate that when tested using the PPVT
in English, their school language, the bilingual children in all age groups scored significantly
lower than monolinguals; however, once scores for school-related vocabulary were analysed
separately from home-related vocabulary items, bilingual and monolingual children’s scores
become much more comparable, with the difference for home-related items remaining,
illustrating the context-specific nature of vocabulary acquisition in a multilingual context. As
the authors conclude, “the smaller vocabulary for bilingual children in each language is not
an overall disadvantage but rather an empirical description that needs to be taken into account
9
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in research designs, especially in tasks that involve verbal ability or lexical processing”
(Bialystok, Luk, Peets, & Yang, 2010, p.530).
It is important to bear in mind that the latter study assessed children’s vocabulary
knowledge in one language only. Replicating earlier findings by Pearson and colleagues,
other recent studies have shown that once bilingual children’s knowledge of
both
languages is
taken into account, their overall vocabularies are indeed on a par with their monolingual
peers’, and this has been found to hold for children from low SES families (Mancilla-
Martinez, Pan, & Vagh, 2011) as well as those from a middle/high SES background (e.g.,
Marchman & Martinez-Sussman, 2002). As highlighted in the study by Mancilla-Martinez et
al., however, how best to measure children’s overall vocabulary is a complex and challenging
task requiring further research.
Much of the work on bilingual vocabulary development focuses on young children,
often at the preschool or kindergarten age (Barnes & García, in press; David & Wei, 2008;
Dixon, 2011). There are however a few studies, in addition to Bialystok et al., which
investigate the lexical development of older children. Both Sheng, Lu and Kan (2011,
Mandarin-English) and Gathercole and Thomas (2009, Welsh-English) find evidence for the
stagnation of vocabulary development as a function of reduced input (see below for further
discussion concerning effects of input quantity).
One final strand of research on bilingual lexical development concerns the link
between vocabulary and other areas, namely between vocabulary and grammar (Marchman,
Martinez-Sussman, & Dale, 2004), and between vocabulary and processing (Marchman,
Fernald, & Hurtado, 2010). The question of whether there are strong ties between the
development of the lexicon and the development of the grammar and/or processing relates to
issues such as modularity, the role of domain-specific versus domain-general learning
mechanisms and maturation (Conboy & Thal, 2006). Studying the relationship between
10
grammatical and lexical development in bilingual children can contribute to the debate about
these issues because it allows us to examine both within-language and cross-language
relationships whilst holding maturation constant, that is, the relationship between e.g.,
grammar and vocabulary can be ascertained within the same child for
both
languages; if
certain developmental patterns are the result of maturation, these should – all things being
equal – hold across both languages within the same child. The results of the aforementioned
studies suggest within-language ties are stronger than cross-language ties, and for the
relationship between lexicon and grammar, Conboy and Thal (2006) conclude that the lack of
significant cross-language relationships is incompatible with the idea that these links are the
result of maturation.
To summarise: recent research on the multilingual first language acquisition of
vocabulary shows that early word learning is affected by context in terms of children’s
sensitivity to and use of certain constraints found to be relevant to monolingual acquisition.
Furthermore, vocabulary is perhaps the one area where significant and persistent bilingual-
monolingual differences have been observed, although note that this concerns comparisons
involving one of the bilingual’s languages only.
Morphosyntax
Most of the research on the multilingual first language acquisition of morphosyntax focuses
on oral production and results suggest that when any bilingual-monolingual differences are
observed, they are generally quantitative in nature rather than qualitative, although qualitative
differences have been observed. The target language properties investigated range from more
general measures of grammatical ability, such as MLU, to specific aspects of the language(s)
in question, e.g., clitics, subject-verb agreement.
11
Several studies report significant differences between bilinguals and monolinguals on
general measures of grammatical ability. For example, Hoff, Core, Place, Rumiche, Señor
and Parra (2012) use caregiver-report data (
MacArthur-Bates
Communicative Development
Inventory
(CDI)
(Fenson et al., 1993)) to estimate grammatical complexity and utterance
length in a group of English-Spanish toddlers in the United States (1;10 to 2;6) and their age-
matched monolingual peers, and they find that the monolingual children were significantly
more advanced than the bilinguals, but once the bilingual children were divided into
dominance groups, based on amount of input as indicated by a detailed parental
questionnaire, the bilingual children with the most exposure to the language to question were
no longer significantly different from the monolinguals. In a study of four Turkish-Dutch
bilingual toddlers, Blom (2010) finds significant bilingual-monolingual differences for MLU
(in words) in Dutch, but not for Turkish (with similar findings for lexical development); she
notes that the results for Turkish may be due to the considerable variation observed in the
monolingual group. This raises the interesting methodological question of what should count
as similarity/difference between bilinguals and monolinguals and how to deal with the
individual variation which also exists amongst monolinguals.
In a study on the acquisition of finiteness in bilingual Basque-Spanish children,
Austin (2009; see also Austin, in press; Blom, 2010) also finds that the rate of Root
Infinitives in Basque is higher for bilinguals than their monolingual peers. The term Root (or
Optional) Infinitive refers to matrix clauses where the child produces a non-finite verb
instead of the target finite form, e.g., ‘she eat ice cream’ instead of ‘she eats ice cream’.
Austin attributes this finding to the bilinguals’ comparatively limited input, which restricts
the rate at which children are able to acquire the target morphologically-specified paradigm
(following Blom, 2007). These findings contrast with those of Hacohen and Schaeffer (2007),
who in a case study of a bilingual child growing up with English and Hebrew, find very low
12
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rates of subject-verb agreement errors in Hebrew, comparable with monolinguals (cf. the
same child’s use of overt subjects, which are regularly pragmatically inappropriate – see also
section below on semantic and pragmatics).
Rate of acquisition differences between bilinguals and monolinguals have also been
found for the use of word order cues to identify sentential subjects (Gathercole & Thomas,
2009), clitics and direct objects (Larrañaga & Guijarro-Fuentes, 2012; Pérez-Leroux,
Pirvulescu, & Roberge, 2009; Pérez-Leroux, Cuza, & Thomas, 2011) and grammatical gender
(Eichler, Jansen, & Müller, in press; Gathercole & Thomas, 2009; Larrañaga & Guijarro-
Fuentes, in press; Nicoladis & Marchak, in press; Unsworth, 2013). In the acquisition of
grammatical gender, bilingual children have been observed to make the same type of errors as
monolingual children, but for some languages at least, e.g., Welsh and Dutch, their rate of
acquisition may be considerably slower than that of monolinguals, at least for those children
with relatively little exposure to the language in question. For example, in a study on the
acquisition of gender-marking on definite determiners and adjectives by English-Dutch
bilinguals aged 3 through 17, Unsworth (2013) finds significant differences between
bilinguals and monolinguals when matched on age; however, once matched on their
cumulative
length of exposure, i.e., their amount of exposure over time, these differences
disappear. Once again, this finding raises important methodological questions about how
bilinguals and monolinguals can be best compared; whilst bilinguals are often matched with
monolinguals of the same age or with the same MLU, an alternative – and for some purposes,
potentially more accurate – basis for comparison might be
cumulative
length of exposure.
Most of the attested bilingual-monolingual differences in the domain of morphosyntax
are quantitative in nature, i.e., bilingual children typically make the same developmental
errors as their monolingual peers but to a greater – and sometimes lesser – degree. Qualitative
differences have however been observed, too. For example, in an extensive longitudinal study
13
of six Cantonese-English bilingual children, Yip and Matthews (2007) find that under
influence from Cantonese, the bilingual children pass through a stage where they consistently
use
wh
-in-situ in English questions, as in
This is what?
instead of
What is this
?. As Yip and
Matthews (2007, p. 98) note, monolingual children consistently place
wh
-expressions in
wh
-
questions in the target clause-initial position. The same authors also argue that qualitative
differences may in fact underlie what at first appear to be quantitative differences: for
example, in the same study of Cantonese-English bilinguals, they suggest that the use of null
objects in the children’s English results from transfer of the mechanism which licenses
sentence topics in Cantonese to English (Yip & Matthews 2007, p. 146).
In line with much of the earlier work on the multilingual first language acquisition of
morphosyntax (see Genesee & Nicoladis, 2007; Meisel, 2004 for review), there are also
several recent studies which observe
similar
patterns of development between bilinguals and
monolinguals. For example, in a study on the early word order acquisition of bilingual
Basque-Spanish children, Barreña and Almgren (in press) observe that bilingual children
show the same word order patterns as monolingual children i.e., predominantly VO in
Spanish and both OV and VO in Basque, replicating earlier findings on bilingual French-
German children (Meisel, 1989). Bonnesen (2008) also observes the target use of verb-
second in German and target finite verb placement (i.e., no verb-second) in French in French-
German bilingual children (see also Rothweiler, 2006 for similar findings with Turkish-
German bilingual children). Finally, Hoff et al. (2012) show that when both of a bilingual
child’s two languages are taken into account, bilinguals are found to produce multi-word
utterances at a comparable age to monolinguals. This latter study stresses the importance of
assessing children in both their languages in order to make an accurate assessment of their
linguistic abilities.
14
To summarise, whilst there is considerable evidence that the multilingual first
language acquisition of morphosyntax by and large follows the same developmental path as
monolingual first language acquisition, where differences are observed, recent research
continues to show that they are mostly quantitative rather than qualitative in nature. These
differences have been attributed to a wide range of factors, including crosslinguistic
influence, dominance and amount and type of input, each of which will be discussed in turn
below.
Semantics and pragmatics
Studies on the multilingual first language acquisition of semantics and/or pragmatics are few
and far between. Much of the work in this area has been conducted by Sorace, Serratrice and
colleagues in relation to the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2011), and has compared bilingual
children’s acquisition of the syntax-semantics vs. syntax-discourse interface; in addition, a
number of recent studies have investigated the acquisition of scrambling.
In a study on the acceptability of plural NP subjects in generic and specific context,
Serratrice, Sorace, Filiaci and Baldo (2009) find that English-Italian bilingual children
overaccepted (ungrammatical) plural bare plurals in generic contexts in Italian, as in *
In
genere squali sono pericolosi
‘In general sharks are dangerous’ (cf. monolinguals who
consistently rejected such sentences). A comparable group of Spanish-Italian bilinguals were
shown to behave significantly more like the Italian monolinguals, suggesting that typological
relatedness (Spanish is more similar to Italian than English) is another factor which should be
taken into consideration when assessing bilingual children’s language abilities and more
specifically, the likelihood of crosslinguistic influence.
The results concerning the bilingual English-Italian children’s sensitivity to specificity
and genericity contrast with their use of subject pronouns. In a study with the same children,
15
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Sorace, Serratrice, Filiaci and Baldo (2009) find that both English-Italian and Spanish-Italian
children overaccept overt subject pronouns referring to a pragmatically inappropriate topic
subject antecedent in Italian when compared with monolinguals. The bilingual children thus
showed similar response patterns, irrespective of their other language. This leads Sorace and
Serratrice (2009) to the conclusion that the crucial factor in determining the extent of
bilingual-monolingual differences is not typological relatedness, although this clearly plays a
role, but whether the linguistic property being acquired involves an internal (syntax-
semantics) or external (syntax-discourse) interface (see Sorace, 2011 and commentaries in
same volume for more on this matter).
Note however that results from a recent study on
German-Italian and French-Italian bilinguals do not tally with this claim: while in line with
previous findings Schmitz, Patuto and Müller (2012) observe the overuse of subject pronouns
in Italian by those children acquiring German as the other language, the children acquiring
French as the other language were similar to monolinguals i.e., they did not overuse subject
pronouns in the same way as the other groups.
Two recent studies have investigated the acquisition of scrambling and more specifically,
the interpretive constraints associated with scrambled indefinite objects.
2
In a study on the
acquisition of scrambling in Ukrainian, Mykhaylyk and Ko (2010) show that bilingual
English-Ukranian children pass through the same stages of development as monolingual
children and that like monolingual children, scrambled indefinite objects are restricted to a
specific, or wide-scope interpretation, as the target adult language requires. Similar results are
found for English-Dutch bilinguals by Unsworth (2012): like monolinguals, the vast majority
of bilingual children in this study were able to consistently interpret scrambled indefinites in
negative sentences as taking a specific, or wide-scope interpretation by the age of 6 years old
2
Scrambling involves the reordering of sentential constituents such that for example the direct object appears to
the left of sentential negation when it is
usually placed to its right. It exists in Dutch, German, Ukranian,
Russian and Japanese, amongst other languages.
16
(see Lee, Kwak, Lee, & O'Grady, 2010; O'Grady, Kwak, Lee, & Lee, 2011 for related work
on scope preferences in Korean-English heritage speakers). As Unsworth (2012) notes, this
finding is all the more striking given the paucity of scrambled indefinite objects in the input.
To summarise, whilst recent research has started to explore the multilingual first language
acquisition of semantics and pragmatics, the number of studies is very limited and the results
are mixed.
CHARACTERISTICS OF MULTILINGUAL FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
The existence of quantitative and/or qualitative differences between bilingual and
monolingual language acquisition has been attributed to a number of characteristics typical of
the multilingual setting. Thus, the existence of another language developing concomitantly
may lead to crosslinguistic influence; typically one language is stronger than the other; and
the quantity and quality of the input to which multilingual children are exposed may differ
from monolinguals. This part addresses each of these characteristics in turn, with a final
section considering the effect of acquiring more than two languages simultaneously, i.e.,
bilingual vs. trilingual acquisition.
Crosslinguistic influence
Whereas the focus of earlier research on multilingual first language acquisition was on the
question of whether a bilingual child’s two languages developed as one or two systems (De
Houwer, 1990; Meisel, 1989; Volterra & Taeschner, 1978), it is generally assumed today that
children separate their two languages from very early on, but that some level of interaction
between the two may nevertheless occur (Paradis & Genesee, 1996). Much of the research
over the past 15 years or so has sought to define the linguistic conditions under which such
17
interaction, or crosslinguistic influence as it commonly referred to, manifests itself, and what
factors modulate its occurrence.
The most prominent proposal concerning the linguistic conditions is that of Hulk and
Müller (2000; see also Müller & Hulk, 2001), who proposed that for crosslinguistic influence
to occur, two conditions must be fulfilled: (i) the target language property should involve the
syntax-pragmatics interface or C-domain, and (ii) there should be surface overlap. Thus if
language A offers evidence for more than one grammatical analysis for the target language
property in question and language B reinforces one of these analyses, crosslinguistic
influence is “probable” (Müller & Hulk, 2001, p.2; see Döpke, 1998 for a similar proposal).
Research conducted since this proposal was first advanced has shown that condition (i) is too
strict, in that crosslinguistic influence has been observed in other areas, e.g., narrow syntax,
syntax-morphology, and syntax-semantics-(lexicon) (e.g., Argyri & Sorace, 2007; Liceras,
Fernández Fuertes, & Alba de la Fuente, 2011; Pérez-Leroux et al., 2011), but that condition
(ii) seems to hold (Foroodi-Nejad & Paradis, 2009; Hacohen & Schaeffer, 2007; see Schmitz
et al., 2012 for a proposed revision to the original formulation of this condition).
An interesting test case for any account of crosslinguistic influence comes from
bimodal bilingual acquisition, i.e., children who grow up with one spoken and one signed
language, as do hearing children of deaf adults, or
codas
/
kodas
, as they are often referred to
(see e.g., Petitto et al., 2001). Research on coda development is still in its infancy, but in a
series of recent studies, Chen Pichler, Lillo-Martin and colleagues, have started to explore the
topic of crosslinguistic influence in this population. For example, in a study on the acquisition
of
wh
-questions in bilingual children acquiring English and American Sign Language (ASL)
or Brazilian Portuguese and Brazilian Sign Language (Libras), Lillo-Martin, Koulidobrova,
de Quadros and Chen Pichler (2012) found evidence for crosslinguistic influence in both
directions: in line with the findings for English in the English-Cantonese bilinguals of Yip
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and Matthews (2007), the bilingual toddlers produced significantly more non-sentence-initial
wh
-questions – grammatical in both of the sign languages – than their monolingual English-
speaking and Brazilian Portuguese-speaking peers, and concomitantly, in their sign
languages, they produced proportionally more sentence-initial
wh
-phrases than their
monolingual peers, arguably as a result of their simultaneous exposure to English.
Crosslinguistic influence may manifest itself as delay or acceleration (Paradis &
Genesee, 1996), sometime simultaneously (Brasileiro, 2009). As this review illustrates, most
of the studies which find bilingual-monolingual differences have observed delay, i.e., a
slower rate of acquisition for bilinguals, although it is important to note that this is for
specific and a limited number of properties of language only, not a general bilingual delay
(cf. Gathercole, 2007). There are however a handful of studies which find evidence for
acceleration, i.e., a faster rate of development in bilinguals when compared with their
monolingual peers. For example, Kupisch (2007) observes that German-Italian bilingual
children acquire German determiners faster than most monolingual German children. Her
explanation for this finding is based on the notion of complexity, i.e., she argues that the
German determiner system is more complex than the Italian one because it contains more
types, each type encodes numerous formal features and the form-function mapping is opaque
(p. 59). Consequently, monolingual German-speaking children typically produce determiners
later than monolingual Italian-speaking children. In the case of the bilingual children in her
study, the presence of a simpler system, which already has determiners in place, facilitates the
development of the more complex determiner system in German. Kupisch also suggests that
such crosslinguistic influence only takes place in unbalanced bilingual children when the
dominant language, in this case Italian, is the facilitating language.
Another example of acceleration is found in a recent study by Liceras, Fernández
Fuertes and Alba de la Fuente (2011; see also Meroni, Unsworth & Smeets, in press), who
19
argue that the presence of two different copulas in Spanish,
ser
and
estar
, facilitates the
acquisition of the copula in English, such that the bilingual English-Spanish children in their
study have lower rates of copula omission than has been observed for monolinguals (Becker,
2004). Finally, on a more general note, in a study on the complexity of phonetic inventories,
Fabiano-Smith and Barlow (2010) suggest that the observation that bilingual children achieve
the same level of complexity within each of their two languages within the same timeframe
as monolingual children could be interpreted as evidence for crosslinguistic influence in the
form of accelerated development, that is, the complexity developed in one language may
‘bootstrap’ development in the other (following Gawlitzek-Maiwald & Tracy, 1996).
To summarise: although recent research has helped refine the conditions which drive
crosslinguistic influence and further documented how such influence manifests itself, many
outstanding issues remain. It is for example clear that the conditions on crosslinguistic
influence – however they are formulated – are sufficient but not necessary, i.e., not all
children exhibit crosslinguistic influence even when the relevant conditions are met
(Gathercole, 2007). The answer to the question of how best to predict which individual
children will evidence crosslinguistic influence remains elusive. In a recent study by Hauser-
Grüdl, Arencibia Guerra, Witzmann, Leray and Müller (2010) suggest that fluency, as
measured by number of words produced per minute, may also play a role in predicting
crosslinguistic influence. Two of the most common predictors discussed in the literature are
however dominance and relative amount of exposure, sometimes with the latter being used as
a proxy for the former.
Dominance
How to measure dominance, broadly defined as “the condition in which bilingual people have
greater grammatical proficiency in, more vocabulary in, or greater fluency in one language or
20
simply use one language (i.e., the dominant language) more often” (Genesee et al., 2004,
p.80), remains a controversial issue in the literature on multilingual first language acquisition.
Whilst it is clear that most bilingual children are dominant in one of their languages, and that
this can and often does change over time (e.g., Yip & Matthews, 2007), the extent to which
dominance can (systematically) predict and explain children’s language outcomes remains
unclear (see Bedore et al., in press; Cantone, Müller, Schmitz, & Kupisch, 2008, for recent
discussion).
As the definition above indicates, dominance can be defined and subsequently
operationalised in terms of children’s relative competence or proficiency in their two (or
more) languages, or in terms of their relative use (see Yip & Matthews, 2006 for relevant
discussion). Proficiency-based variables which are commonly used as measures of
dominance include MLU, upper bound i.e., longest utterance(s) in a recording, and the
number of multi-morphemic utterances (Genesee, Nicoladis, & Paradis, 1995) and more
recently, increases in the noun and verb lexicon (Kupisch, 2007; Kupisch, 2008) and
vocabulary size (Foroodi-Nejad & Paradis, 2009). Measures of dominance based on language
use include number of utterances, fluency (based on parental report, Foroodi-Nejad &
Paradis, 2009; Hauser-Grüdl et al., 2010)), and amount of exposure (e.g., Argyri & Sorace,
2007).
Once a (number of) measure(s) has been selected, a further consideration is how it
should be used. One approach is to use the children’s scores on the selected measure(s) to
calculate a “balance score” (Cantone et al., 2008), whereby scores from language A are
subtracted from the scores from language B, and any differences are assumed to indicate
dominance (Bedore et al., in press; Pérez-Leroux et al., 2011). The extent to which a given
difference can justifiably be taken as an indicator of dominance will of course depend on the
measure and the range of attested scores; it is however sometimes far from clear how large a
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difference needs to be in order to be able to speak of dominance. One approach is to compare
children’s scores statistically, and only count significant between-language differences as
indicators of dominance (Yip & Matthews, 2006), or – when using standardised scores – to
see whether children reach age-appropriate monolingual norms for one language, but not the
other. Despite these complications, using such differential scores for MLU, as advocated by
Yip and Matthews (2006), makes it possible to compare children with the same language
combination and at the same time circumvent the problem of the crosslinguistic validity of
MLU as a measure of morphosyntactic complexity.
As illustrated in the preceding section, dominance has been put forward by some
researchers as an explanatory factor for certain instances of crosslinguistic influence (Yip &
Matthews, 2007). Others however have demonstrated that crosslinguistic influence can occur
independent of language dominance (Hulk & Müller, 2000), and it has also been claimed that
dominance may predict crosslinguistic influence but the extent to which this is the case is
moderated by other factors, such as linguistic complexity (Kupisch, 2007) and the
minority/majority status of the languages in question (Foroodi-Nejad & Paradis, 2009). More
specifically, in the latter study the authors investigated the role of dominance as a predictor
for crosslinguistic influence in the acquisition of compound nouns in Persian-English
bilinguals whose exposure to Persian was restricted to home and who were learning English
at daycare. Dominance effects were observed for Persian but not for English, and the authors
suggest that this asymmetry may be due to the majority language status of English and the
fact that for all the children, this was an ‘ascending’ language, whereas Persian was for some
children at least in the process of stagnating.
Dominance has also been found to correlate with language mixing, that is, bilingual
children have been found to use more mixed language utterances in their less dominant
language (Kupisch, 2008), although again, this effect has been found to interact with other
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factors, namely sociolinguistic context (Paradis & Nicoladis, 2007). More specifically, in a
study on the language-mixing patterns of French-English bilingual children in a minority-
French region of Canada, Paradis and Nicoladis (2007) observe that the English-dominant
children produced mixed language utterances more frequently in a French context than the
French-dominant children did in an English context, reflecting the sociolinguistic
characteristics of this community, namely that almost all French-speaking adults are
bilingual, whereas many English-speaking adults are not.
To summarise: while there exists no consensus concerning how best to operationalise
dominance, this property of multilingual first language acquisition has been linked to rates of
mixing and to the direction of crosslinguistic influence; furthermore, other factors such as
sociolinguistic setting have been found to moderate the effects of dominance.
Input quantity
On the assumption that bilingual children are awake for the same number of hours as
monolingual children and that their caregivers vary in talkativeness to the same extent as
caregivers of bilingual children, we can safely assume that, on the whole, bilingual children
will be exposed to less language input than monolinguals. Furthermore, given the numerous
factors affecting bilingual language environments, considerable heterogeneity exists
within
the bilingual population, too. For example, in a recent study on English-Dutch simultaneous
bilinguals growing up in comparable sociolinguistic contexts in the Netherlands, Unsworth
(2013) found that the average weekly proportion of language exposure in Dutch varied from
8% to 93%. Such variation has been put forward to explain observed differences in rate of
acquisition between bilinguals and monolinguals, as well as differences between bilinguals.
For example, recent research on multilingual first language acquisition has claimed that
differential effect of amount of input on rate of acquisition for general measures of
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vocabulary and grammar (Barnes & García, in press; David & Wei, 2008; Hoff et al., 2012;
Place & Hoff, 2011; Thordardottir, 2011), aspects of morphosyntax such as verbal
morphology (Blom, 2010; Nicoladis, Palmer, & Marentette, 2007; Paradis, 2010; Paradis,
Nicoladis, Crago, & Genesee, 2011) and grammatical gender (Gathercole & Thomas, 2009;
Unsworth, 2013), as well as phonological abilities, including the discrimination of certain
phonemes (Sundara, Polka, & Genesee, 2006) and the ability to liaise and elide (Nicoladis &
Paradis, 2011).
Studies vary as to whether children’s language abilities are measured directly or
indirectly, using e.g., parental report measures such as CDI, and whether they concentrate on
one domain in depth (e.g., Thordardottir, 2011) or compare different domains (Bohman,
Bedore, Pena, Mendez-Perez, & Gillam, 2010; Gathercole & Thomas, 2009; Hoff et al.,
2012). Typically, amount of input is estimated on the basis of extensive parental (and
sometimes teacher) questionnaires (e.g., Gutiérrez-Clellen & Kreiter, 2003; Paradis, 2011) or
by using some other measure as a proxy (e.g., vocabulary abilities, see Nicoladis & Paradis,
2011). Other more detailed approaches include asking caregivers to keep a language exposure
diary (De Houwer & Bornstein, 2003; Place & Hoff, 2011) or using new recording and
automated analysis technology such as LENA (see e.g., D. K. Oller, 2010 for the use of
LENA to measure input in a trilingual setting).
3
De Houwer (2007) assesses the relation between language input patterns and
children’s language proficiency on a very general level using data from a large-scale survey
of family language use in Flanders, Belgium. In the families (n=1899) examined, she finds
that children were most likely to speak both the minority and the majority language when
both parents spoke the minority language and at most one parent spoke the majority language
3
When examining the differential effect of amount of input on multilingual first language acquisition, most
researchers operationalise amount of input in terms of
relative
rather than
absolute
amount of input (but see De
Houwer, 2011).
24
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at home. Similarly, in a study of the vocabulary development of bilingual kindergarten
children in the multilingual context of Singapore, where English is the language of schooling,
Dixon (2011) found that children whose primary caregiver at home spoke English only, or
English plus the home language (Mandarin, Malay or Tamil) scored significantly higher than
those children whose primary caregiver spoke the home language only. Children’s home
language vocabulary was also found to be a significant positive predictor of their English
vocabulary, in line with Cummins’ (2000) interdependence hypothesis, the idea that while a
child’s two languages may have different surface features, they share a common underlying
proficiency (see also Scheele, Leseman, & Mayo, 2010).
One finding replicated in several studies is that differences between monolingual and
bilingual children are often restricted to the children’s less dominant language, that is, when
bilingual children are compared with monolingual children in their dominant language, such
differences disappear (Hoff et al., 2012; Paradis, 2010; Paradis et al., 2011). In Hoff et al.
(2012), for example, bilingual English-Spanish toddlers with at least 70% exposure to
English were found not to significantly differ from monolinguals on measures of grammatical
complexity and vocabulary (see Barnes & García, in press for similar findings using CDI data
from Basque). Thordardottir (2011), on the other hand, finds that the bilingual French-
English 5-year-old children in her study reach age-appropriate monolingual norms for
receptive vocabulary after having received at least 40% exposure or more to the language in
question, whereas for expressive vocabulary, this figure was slightly higher at 60%. Given
that these two studies examine different stages of development (toddlers vs. school-aged
children) using different methods (parental report vs. standardised tests), it is not clear that
their results are directly comparable. One noteworthy aspect of Thordardottir’s (2011) study
is its novel approach, namely the use of curve-fitting analysis to detect both linear and non-
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linear relationships between input quantity and language outcomes (see also Bedore et al., in
press).
A factor related to input quantity which is sometimes incorporated into investigations
of multilingual first language acquisition is children’s output. More in particular, Pearson
(2007) discusses an “input-proficiency-use cycle” as a means of relating the two whereby
children who hear more input become more proficient in the language in question and this, in
turn, leads to more use, which subsequently invites more input. A number of recent studies
have found that output is indeed a significant predictor of bilingual children’s language
outcomes. For example, Hammer et al. (in press) observe that both amount of input and
output (or usage, in their terms) is significant predictor of bilingual Spanish-English
children’s vocabulary and narrative skills abilities. These results are broadly in line with those
of Bohman et al. (2010), although this study finds differential effects on children’s input and
output across different domains. More specifically, in an assessment of the morphosyntactic
and semantic abilities of (a large number of) bilingual children in both their languages
(English and Spanish), Bohman et al. observe that input quantity was a significant predictor
of whether children scored zero or one or more on a language screening test, which they
interpret as an indicator of initial language learning, whereas output was a significant
predictor of higher scores. The authors thus conclude that whereas input seems to be
important in establishing initial knowledge in a language, using the language i.e., output is
important in adding to that knowledge. Furthermore, different factors were found to affect
different domains; for example, initial development on semantics was related to input more
than output, whereas morphosyntax was related to both. It is suggested that this is due to the
need for practice in order to use inflectional morphology productively.
Differences between different linguistic domains with respect to the role of input were
also observed in Unsworth’s (2013) study on the acquisition of grammatical gender by
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bilingual English-Dutch children. More specifically, she found that whereas children’s scores
for gender-marking on definite determiners with neuter nouns (gender attribution) were best
predicted by amount of input (at time of testing and over time), the only significant predictor
for children’s scores for gender-marking on adjectives (gender agreement) was their scores on
definite determiners. Unsworth argues that the effect of input on definite determiners is due to
the Dutch gender system, which – as a result of very few systematic cues for neuter–
necessitates children to attribute gender more or less on a noun by noun basis for neuter,
thereby requiring considerable exposure for acquisition to take place, whereas gender
agreement, a purely morphosyntactic process is not (directly) affected by differences in input
quantity because once the relevant grammatical features and rules have been acquired, they
are applied automatically where required (see also Bianchi, 2012).
The theoretical importance attributed to the relationship between
amount of input and children’s language development depends on one’s theoretical
persuasion. Several studies (Gathercole & Thomas, 2009; Hammer et al., in press; Paradis,
2010; Paradis et al., 2011) have argued that input effects in multilingual first language
acquisition offer support to the usage-based or constructivist approach to language acquisition
(Tomasello, 2003). Oversimplifying somewhat, the general idea is that if language is acquired
in a piecemeal fashion on the basis of the input, as is claimed to be the case on this approach,
we can expect an effect of relative amount of input for bilingual children for both vocabulary
and grammar (see e.g., Gathercole, 2007). According to these researchers, the observation
that such effects exist – and as we have seen in this section, they often do – offers support to
this account of language acquisition.
It is however important to note that many (but not necessarily all) of the linguistic
properties tested in many of these studies, such as verbal morphology and vocabulary, would
be expected to involve a significant input component on any approach to language
27
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development. In order to systematically investigate the theoretical importance of input in
multilingual first language acquisition, and what this means for theories of language
acquisition, it is necessary to examine a number of specific linguistic properties from the
same and from different linguistic domains within the same children, and relate these to
particular theories concerning the exact role of amount of input for those specific properties
of language. Furthermore, any account which crucially relies on input quantity also needs to
be able to explain the similar rates of acquisition observed for bilingual and monolingual
children in many cases (Paradis et al., 2011): even if it is the bilingual children with the most
amount of input who are indistinguishable from monolinguals, their total amount of input will
still remain significantly lower than that of (many) monolinguals.
In theoretical approaches such as the generative/nativist paradigm, where input is
argued to underdetermine the unconscious knowledge children acquire (Chomsky, 1959), the
observation that relative amount of input predicts language outcomes in multilingual first
language acquisition presents a challenge. This is not necessarily because there is no role for
input on this account – to the contrary, no generativist would deny that input in one (or more)
language(s) is crucial for acquisition to take place – but rather, because there is no clear
theory on how exactly input interacts with children’s innate knowledge such that
development occurs.
4
To summarise, faster rates of development in bilingual children is often correlates
with relative amount of input, and this has been observed for the acquisition of vocabulary
and certain aspects of morphosyntax, most typically verbal morphology. This observation has
been argued to provide evidence for a constructivist or usage-based theories, but more data
from a wider range of linguistic phenomena are needed to test this and other approaches to
language acquisition more thoroughly.
4
One promising account in this regard might be Yang’s (2002) Variational Learning Model, although to my
knowledge, this has yet to be applied to bilingual/second language acquisition.
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Input quality
Bilingual children’s language exposure varies not only in amount but also in type, that is, in
terms of quality as well as quantity, and to a certain extent, the two are inextricable (Paradis,
2011). Various factors may contribute to qualitative input differences in multilingual first
language acquisition. These include the richness of children’s language input, defined as
input from a variety of difference sources, e.g., TV, reading, friends, etc.. (Jia & Fuse, 2007),
the variety of speakers providing language input (Place & Hoff, 2011), the types of activities
for which the language is used (e.g., Scheele et al., 2010), whether input-providers speak a
standard or non-standard variety (Cornips & Hulk, 2008; Larrañaga & Guijarro-Fuentes,
2012), and whether they are native or non-native speakers (Place & Hoff, 2011), as well as
the number and type of literacy-related activities (Scheele et al., 2010). As with input
quantity, for input quality there are differences between bilingual children which also exist
amongst monolingual children and have been found to affect monolingual language
acquisition (e.g., socio-economic status, Hoff, 2006), and there are also differences which are
specific to bilingual acquisition, such as code-mixing (Byers-Heinlein, 2013). A number of
recent studies have started to explore the extent to which variation in bilingual children’s
input quality affects their language development.
In an investigation of bilingual Spanish-English toddlers using language diary data,
Place and Hoff (2011) examine the relation between children’s grammatical and lexical
development, as measured by the CDI, and several qualitative input factors, including the
proportion of English or Spanish input provided by native speakers, the number of different
speakers providing input in a given language as well as the number of conversational partners
with whom the child exclusively spoke English or Spanish. For Spanish, none of these factors
were found to correlate with language outcomes, but as the authors note, this is likely due to
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the limited variance in both predictors and outcome variables for this language. For English,
all three factors correlated significantly with vocabulary, and importantly, this held when
amount of exposure was held constant; for grammatical complexity, there were significant
correlations with the number of different speakers and the number of exclusively English
conversational partners. The authors conclude that the finding that variability in speakers is
positively related to vocabulary and grammar may reflect the need for “exposure to
variability in the signal in order to extract the categories that will support later recognition
and production”, as has been suggested for phonological and lexical learning (e.g., Singh,
2008, qtd in Place & Hoff, p. 1847). Furthermore, the findings concerning non-native input
suggest furthermore that “non-native input is less useful to language acquisition than native
input” (p. 1847 – see also Hammer, Davison, Lawrence, & Miccio, 2009). As the authors
note, however, their study does not identify
why
this should be the case.
5
The possible effect of non-native exposure on children’s language development has
also been investigated for phonemic differentiation. More specifically, in a series of
experiments assessing children’s ability to detect mispronounced /
/ and /e/ vowels in
ɛ
Catalan, Ramon-Casas, Swingley, Sebastián-Galles and Bosch (2009) found that whereas
monolinguals were sensitive to such mispronunciations, bilingual Catalan-Spanish toddlers
and preschoolers – and in particular those with more exposure to Spanish than Catalan – were
not. The authors suggest that exposure to similar mispronounced vowels in the accented
speech of their non-native Catalan-speaking parent may mean that bilingual children have
“learned to overcome variation in these sounds” (p. 116).
5
Several studies investigating the language development of successive bilingual / second language children –
and therefore strictly speaking outside the remit of this review – have observed that when non-native-speaker
mothers provide input, their relative proficiency is related to their children’s language development
(Chondrogianni & Marinis, 2011; Hammer et al., in press; J. Paradis, 2011).
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The existence of within-speaker variation is not specific to the bilingual context, and
in certain circumstances, exposure to non-native input may also be a factor to consider in
monolingual settings. Exposure to mixed language utterances is however almost certainly a
characteristic which is exclusive to the multilingual setting. In a recent study, Byers-Heinlein
(2013) investigates the relation between exposure to differing degrees of language mixing
and children’s vocabulary size in English. Her findings show that whilst controlling for
amount of exposure, gender, the child’s age and the balance between a child’s two languages
in terms of exposure, higher rates of language mixing by parents predicted smaller receptive
vocabularies at age 1.5 years and marginally smaller productive vocabularies at age 2. Byers-
Heinlein speculates that language mixing may have an adverse effect on children’s speech
perception abilities, which in turn may mean that new words are less readily detected, which
consequently results in a smaller vocabulary size. Whether this explanation holds water upon
further investigation remains to be seen, but the Language Mixing Scale which Byers-
Heinlein has developed and extensively tested as part of this study will surely become a very
useful tool for future research into this particular aspect of input quality in multilingual first
language acquisition.
To summarise: research on the effects of input quality on multilingual first language
acquisition is relatively new and has largely focused on the role of non-native exposure. The
findings available thus far suggest that non-native input may be less beneficial than native
input and exposure to non-native input may affect the developmental path which children
follow.
Bilingual vs. trilingual first language acquisition
M
ost of the research on multilingual first language acquisition concerns bilinguals
rather than trilinguals. The study of trilingual first language acquisition is however potentially
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relevant and informative from both a theoretical and practical perspective. Hoffman (2001)
distinguishes five different types of trilinguals, including children growing up with two
languages at home which are different from the language of the wide community, bilingual
children who become trilingual via immigration, and third language learners. Given that the
topic of this review is multilingual
first
language acquisition, this section is limited to the first
type, i.e., children who grow up with three languages (more or less) simultaneously. As we
shall see, research on early trilingual development is still in its infancy. Most studies involve
observational case studies, often with rather little (linguistic) data (Hoffman, 2001). Much of
the work adopts a comparative approach, contrasting trilingual development with bilingual,
and sometimes monolingual, development. Research thus far has focussed on two topics,
namely the question of early language differentiation and the potential effect of reduced input
on trilingual children’s language development.
In a series of papers, Montanari (2009a; 2009b; 2010; 2011) provides evidence of
early differentiation in the language development of a trilingual Tagalog-Spanish-English
child at the pragmatic, phonological, lexical and syntactic level. The child was exposed to
Tagalog by her mother and maternal grandparents, to Spanish by her father and paternal
grandparents, and to English from her older sister and indirectly from family conversations,
which occurred in English. Her direct exposure to Tagalog (approx. 48%) during the period
of study was thus greater than the other two languages (approx. 29% for Spanish and approx.
23% for English). The data in each of these papers concern her language development up to
the age of 2. Montanari (2009a) examines the child’s earliest multiword utterances and finds
that these follow the appropriate relative argument-predicate ordering in each of her three
languages, i.e., predicate-argument for Tagalog, argument-predicate for English and both
orders for Spanish. Furthermore, the child’s mixed utterances are shown to result from
vocabulary gaps rather than the use of a unified system, in line with previous research. Quay
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(2008) also uses mixed utterances as a means of showing early language differentiation: in
her study, a trilingual Mandarin-Japanese-English child was found to adapt her rate of mixed
utterances and the languages used in those mixed utterances to the language preferences and
abilities of her interlocutor. In other words, her different mixing patterns across languages
provided evidence of her early language separation (see also Quay, 2010).
Montanari (2010) provides a detailed analysis of the early lexical development of the
same trilingual Tagalog-Spanish-English child, showing that translational equivalents are
used from early on, as early and at the same rate as has been observed by bilinguals.
However, the extent to which the child learned equivalent words in all three of her languages
reflected the relative exposure patterns to these languages, i.e., while there were numerous
Tagalog-English and Tagalog-Spanish doublets, the number of English-Spanish doublets was
limited. Interestingly, the rate at which the child formed a triplet was twice as quick as the
rate at which she formed a doublet; this, Montanari notes, is in line with Lanvers’ (1999)
“bilingual lexical bootstrapping” hypothesis, the idea that knowledge of a concept in one
language facilitates the acquisition of the label for that concept in the other, and in the case of
trilinguals, Montanari argues, familiarity with learning equivalents may have also expedited
development of triplet forms. This could be viewed as crosslinguistic influence manifesting
itself as acceleration.
Finally, with respect to the child’s early phonological development, Montanari (2011)
finds that the trilingual child’s early word-initial consonants follow the language-specific
gestural properties e.g., appropriate place and manner of articulation, of each of her three
languages. Furthermore, the child’s consonantal systems are not only differentiated, but fairly
advanced when compared with monolinguals. It is suggested that this may be due to
heightened sensitivity to language and its properties as a result of early multilingual exposure.
In a study on the phonological development of a trilingual Spanish-Mandarin-Taiwanese
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child, Yang and Zhu (2010) also observe early differentiation as evidenced by different rates
of acquisition in the three languages, sometimes for the same phoneme.
Trilingual children have to divide their time across three languages, and thus may
have even more reduced input than many bilingual children, at least in one of their three
languages. The question of how this comparatively limited input affects
trilingual children’s
language development – as investigated for bilinguals when compared to monolinguals – has
also been addressed in the recent literature on early trilingual acquisition. Given that relative
amount of input was not directly reflected in the relative rate of acquisition in the three
languages acquired by the child in the Yang and Zhu study, the authors note that the
relationship between amount of input and rate of acquisition is clearly not a direct one.
Furthermore, given that the child’s development was very much like that of monolingual
children with respect to age of acquisition, rate of acquisition and error patterns, the authors
stress that the inevitable reduction in input for trilingual children does necessarily lead to
slower acquisition. Similar conclusions are drawn by Montanari (2009a; 2009b; 2010; 2011).
In a study on the linguistic development of a bilingual child acquiring Basque,
Spanish and English, Barnes (2011; see also Barnes, 2006) addresses the role of input in
trilingual first language acquisition from a slightly different perspective. She highlights the
fact that many trilingual (and in many cases, bilingual) children receive exposure to one and
possibly two of their languages from just one person, i.e., the parent speaking a language
which is not spoken outside the home. As such, the child may acquire aspects of the language
in question which are marked by the specific characteristics of the person providing the input,
e.g., sex and age; in a similar vein to Place and Hoff (2011), reviewed in the preceding
section, Barnes suggests that in order to become fully competent users of the language in
question, children may need exposure from a wider variety of sources.
34
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On a more general level, in her large-scale survey on multilingual families De
Houwer (2004) also analysed language use in trilingual families (n = 244). In line with the
findings for bilingual families, she found that parental input patterns were related to
children’s abilities in the two minority languages. More specifically, when neither parent
spoke Dutch at home, and
both
parents spoke
both
minority languages, there was a three in
four chance that at least one of the children in the family spoke all three languages, i.e., the
two minority languages plus Dutch.
De Houwer’s findings for trilingual families are thus in
line with those reported above for bilingual families.
The question of whether there is crosslinguistic influence in early trilingual
acquisition has received little attention (cf. adult L3 acquisition – see [refer to relevant paper
in same volume]). Interestingly, however, one of the few studies addressing this issue
(Kazzazi, 2011) examines compound nouns in two Persian-English-German trilingual
children and finds similar patterns of crosslinguistic influence as observed for bilingual
children (Foroodi-Nejad & Paradis, 2009). In this particular case, two of the children’s three
languages (English and German) behave similarly with respect to the linguistic property in
question; it is logically possible that more complex situations may arise, where all three
languages differ. To what extent such a situation would affect the degree of crosslinguistic
influence is unclear, but the variation in language combinations and dominance patterns
which the trilingual context offers will surely offer a fruitful area for testing many of the
proposals concerning crosslinguistic influence developed on the basis of bilingual data.
To summarise, recent research suggests that trilingual first language acquisition
proceeds in much the same fashion as bilingual and monolingual first language acquisition,
but the available data are from just a handful of children. As Montanari (2009, 2010) notes, in
order to evaluate the wider validity of the findings and claims observed thus far, more (larger-
35
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scale) studies are needed with children learning both typologically related and unrelated
languages.
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
In conclusion, while in many cases multilingual first language acquisition proceeds within the
same timeframe and by and large at the same rate as monolingual first language acquisition,
there exist numerous quantitative and – to a lesser degree – qualitative differences between
language development in bilinguals and monolinguals. Multilingual first language acquisition
is a complex process which is affected by a range of factors, including the amount and type of
available input, the combination of languages being acquired and their typological
relatedness, and children’s relative proficiency in the two or more languages. Furthermore,
some areas of language, such as vocabulary, are more susceptible to bilingual-monolingual
differences than others.
The study of multilingual first language acquisition has the potential to offer unique
insights into how language development proceeds and more specifically, the role of input
quantity and input quality in this process. In doing so, it may shed light on one of the central
debates in linguistics, namely whether language acquisition is based on innate linguistic
structures interacting with the input or whether it is built on the basis of input using domain-
general cognitive and communicative skills. Furthermore, a more complete understanding of
multilingual first language acquisition is necessary to be able to advise parents, educators and
clinicians in how best to assess and facilitate bilingual children’s language development.
Before we are able to achieve these goals, more research is necessary. Most of the
studies addressing the role of input quantity/quality depend on parental report data, either to
measure children’s language outcomes or to derive predictor variables; the findings of these
studies need to be corroborated with behavioural data and direct observations of input
36
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quantity/quality. Furthermore, longitudinal data are needed to reinforce claims made about
causality, and to determine whether in certain contexts, and if so how, the complex interplay
of internal and external factors in bilingual acquisition may change over time and for
different age groups. In addition, for a more complete understanding of this interplay of
factors, it would be desirable to collect data across a wide range of linguistic domains within
the
same
group of children. Finally, more studies employing experimental techniques and
collecting cross-sectional data in addition to longitudinal case studies are needed for a
systematic investigation of trilingual first language acquisition, an area which has thus far
attracted little attention.
Word count (excl. references): 10838
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