A Case Study on the Acquisition of Plurality in a Bilingual Malay-English Context-bound Child

Abstract

The early development of simultaneous bilinguals has been at the core of heated controversy since the mid-seventies. The Unitary Language System Hypothesis by Volterra and Taeschner saw early development as a single language system gradually diverging into two systems. On the contrary, Meisel (1989), De Houwer (1990) and Paradis and Genesee (1996) suggested the early separation of two linguistic systems. Neither position, however, considered language environmental conditions constraining development as key variables. This paper aims to show that the predominant environmental languages to which the Malay-English bilingual child in the current study was alternately exposed might have played an important role in shaping the child's acquisition of plurality in each language. Throughout the period of investigation (from age 3;4 to 3;10 and at 4;8) the child's interactions were regularly audio and video recorded. The current study focuses on the development of plural marking in a simultaneous Malay-English bilingual child. Interestingly, at a point when English was environmentally predominant, the child would occasionally use the English plural suffix-s on Malay nouns. After moving back to Malaysia, the child used reduplication to mark plurals in both languages. The findings of this study indicate that the predominant linguistic environment in which the child grows and develops plays an important role in shaping the child's language production.

A Systematic Review on Bilingualism and Language Processing from 2015-2019

“…Out of the 20 articles, only 4 were conducted in Malaysia with only 2 of them researching about bilingualism in the context of language processing. However, the 2 studies conducted about bilingualism and language processing which are by Salleh, Kawaguchi, Jones and Biase (2016) as well as Salleh, Kawaguchi and Biase (2019), cannot be an accurate representation of the trend regarding bilingualism and language processing in Malaysia due to various reasons. The reasons being that the later study is actually a longitudinal study conducted on the same participant as a follow up study and in both the studies, the undeniable limitation is the generalization of findings based on a single bilingual subject as admitted by the researchers themselves (Salleh et al, 2016;Salleh, Kawaguchi & Biase, 2019).…”