The present paper examines the development of narrative competence in the two languages of three Spanish-English bilingual children with different proficiency levels in each language. The children's narratives, elicited at two different times over a six-month span, are examined in terms of the young narrator's ability to organize the story around an overall theme line, his/her capacity to evaluate the narrative and reach the audience, and his /her appropriate use of those linguistic devices—such as temporal perspective and cohesion—that relate utterances to one another allowing for the creation of a narrative text. The results indicate that impoverished linguistic resources might be detrimental for narrative competence. Without an array of linguistic devices at their disposal, the children in this study fail to produce coherent and cohesive narratives in their L2. Yet, their L1 narrative discourse suggests that the children possess the cognitive skills underlying the ability to construct thematically oriented and linguistically cohesive accounts. Evaluation, on the other hand, appears to be proficiency-independent: despite their limited L2 competence, the children are capable, from early on, of evaluating both their Spanish and English narratives, and they do so by means of a preferred evaluative strategy or by a combination of different expressive devices.

This study examines pragmatic differentiation in early trilingual development through a longitudinal analysis of language choice in a developing Tagalog-Spanish-English trilingual child. The child's patterns of language choice with different language users are analyzed at age 1 ; 10 and 2 ; 4 to examine: (1) whether evidence for pragmatic differentiation can be found even before age two and in simultaneous interactions with distinct language users; (2) whether lexical gaps determine the child's choice of one language over another; and (3) whether her patterns of language choice are affected by the interlocutors language use and their responses to mixing. The results indicate that the child was capable of selecting the appropriate language according to the interlocutors' language from the earliest sessions. However, switches to inappropriate languages were common due to vocabulary gaps, the interlocutors' acceptance of mixing and the possibilities determined by the existence of multiple lexical resources and multiple language users.

This article studies the acquisition of copulas by a Spanish–English bilingual between the ages of 1;6 and 3;0, examines the possibility of interlanguage influence, and considers the distributional frequencies of copular constructions in the speech of the child and in the language input from adults. The study is of interest because the bilingual child needs to acquire semantic and syntactic contrasts in Spanish that are not explicitly marked in English. This difference raises questions about the timing of acquisition of the Spanish copulas under pressure from a stronger language, in addition to the language-internal questions concerning the acquisition of the semantics and syntax of these verbs. The results show that copular constructions develop autonomously, but with a slight delay in the acquisition of estar interpreted as a possible type of influence from English. The distributional analysis reveals parallels between the child's and the adults' uses of copulas, thus supporting a process of acquisition guided by the nature of the interactions that the child enters into with the adults who surround him.

This study examines lexical differentiation in early trilingual development through an analysis of the translation equivalents (TEs) produced by a Tagalog-Spanish-English trilingual child. The child's cumulative vocabulary between 1;4 and 2;0 was reconstructed through diary records and audio-recordings, and the extent to which phonetically distinct equivalent doublets and triplets were represented in her cumulative lexicon was examined. The results indicate that TEs were produced from early on, similarly to bilingual children. However, the amount of input heard in each language determined the number and types of equivalents acquired. Also, learning a second TE took less time than learning a first, suggesting that the initial differentiation of the lexicon as evidenced by doublets might facilitate the emergence of multiple lexical systems.