Child Comprehension of Adults’ Verbal Input: A Case of Bilingual Acquisition in Infancy

Abstract

Research concerning comprehension in early simultaneous bilingualism is still very limited. Thus, this study focuses on describing a bilingual infant's comprehension of adults' verbal input addressed to the child in an Indonesian-German language environment, and the child's understanding of translation equivalents (TEs). The child, who was exposed to Indonesian and German simultaneously from birth, was observed from age 0;9 to age 1;3 using a diary supplemented with weekly video recordings. A "one parent-one language" system was applied in which the child received Indonesian language from the mother and German language from the father from birth. Since the family live in Indonesia and have regular contact to the collective family members, the child received dominant exposure in Indonesian compared to German. The data was transcribed and analysed using ELAN. The results show that the adults' verbal inputs in the form of speech addressed to the child were in the form of short utterances which very often had a high-pitched sound and were rich in repetition. The adults' speech was able to be discriminated by the child. In the pre-production stage, the child could understand approximately 6 (six) proper nouns, 18 (eighteen) Indonesian words and 14 (fourteen) German words. The result reveals that the child could comprehend more words in Indonesian than in German. It was also found that the child could understand some bilingual synonyms, which implies that at the pre-production stage, the child already went through a process of bilingual development.

YouTube as Digital Learning Resources for Teaching Bilingual Young Learners

“…As anyone with a YouTube account can upload their videos to YouTube, various languages are used, depending on the nationality and the choice of language preferred by the content creatures. This multilingual exposure can benefit bilingual children who learn new languages [28], [39], [51] either simultaneously or successively [16], [50]. In children learning English as their second language, the videos uploaded in English can be choices for their language exposure.…”

Bilingualism Practices Through Teacher's Verbal Input in Early Childhood Education

“…Adults" verbal input plays an important role in children"s bilingual acquisition. Adnyani et al, (2017) added that input addressed to a child is focusing on the adult's speech input or an adult"s verbal input. de Houwer et al, (2006) pointed out that research in developmental bilingualism commonly tends to focus on language production.…”

“…Current discussion on bilingualism practices through teachers' verbal input to children mostly highlighted about bilingualism practices at home by the parents (Adnyani et al, 2017), bilingualism practices and its influence on children's" L2 language development (Poulain & Brauer, 2018), and teacher"s bilingual verbal input in the classroom (Grøver et al, 2018). Adnyani et al, (2017); Grøver et al, (2018) found that the teacher"s verbal input has an important role in bilingualism practices toward children. As a result, future studies might investigate how adult"s verbal input might differ in their influence on child language development (Poulain & Brauer, 2018).…”

Early Lexical Development and the Development of Translation Equivalents in a Simultaneous Bilingual Child

“…Evidence of morphosyntactic separation was found by DeHouwer (1990), in comprehension by Adnyani, Beratha, & Suparwa (2017) and Nakamura (2010), in pragmatic by Nicoladis (1998) in phonology by Adnyani & Pastika(2016). This paper, is then trying to focus on the development of lexicon by a bilingual child exposed in Indonesian and German as well as looking at the translation equivalent which indicates that a bilingual child has the capacity to separate two different language systems.…”