The acquisition of morphology by a bilingual child: A whole-word approach

Abstract

The avoidance of inflectional markers, a kind of "macrodevelopment'' in the acquisition of morphology, is described in this analysis bf the strategies displayed by a bilingual child simultaneously exposed to Estonian and to English. A whole-word approach was manifested in: the acquisition of postpositions before case endings; the learning of pronominal case and other suppletive or irregular forms before regular markers were used; the borrowing of the analytic English construction with have into Estonian; and the preference for did + verb for the expression of the English past tense. In interpreting these data the factor of bilingualism per se is weighed against the possible existence of a whole-word approach to language in general as a manifestation of a particular cognitive style.

Prosodic structures and templates in bilingual phonological development

“…Deuchar and Quay's Appendix II, a cumulative lexicon of first word-uses from M's first word to age 1;10, was the primary data source, supplemented by an appendix to Quay, 1993, in which variant forms are included. Hildegard (first-born, female) was raised in the United States with an English-speaking mother and a German-speaking father (diarist father: Leopold, 1939). Raivo (second-born, male) was raised in the United States with Estonian and some English in the home; English was spoken in the nursery school attended half time from 14 months (diarist mother: Vihman, 1981, 1982, 2014 [Appendix III]). Maarja (first-born, female) was raised in Estonia with an English-speaking mother and an Estonian-speaking father; Estonian was spoken in the nursery school attended full time from 17 months (diarist mother: see Vihman & Vihman, 2011). Kaia (second-born, female) was raised in Estonia with an English-speaking mother and a bilingual older sister (Maarja), who mainly used English with her, and an Estonian-speaking father; Estonian was spoken in the nursery school attended full time from 17 months (diarist mother: unpublished data). …”

Interaction in bilingual phonological acquisition: evidence from phonetic inventories

“…This is attributed to the phonotactics against that feature in one of the target languages impeding acquisition of that feature in the other language. Evidence of deceleration has been documented in the literature in the area of syntactic acquisition in bilinguals (Kester & Gorman, 1996; Vihman, 1982; Swain, 1972), and more recently, for phonological acquisition (e.g., Fabiano-Smith & Goldstein, in press; Gildersleeve, Davis, & Stubbe, 1996). For instance, Gildersleeve-Neumann, Kester, Davis, and Peña (2008) found evidence for slower acquisition of English phonology by typically developing, Spanish-English bilingual 3-year-olds.…”

A Longitudinal Study of Pragmatic Differentiation in Young Bilingual Children

“…Researchers have commonly examined code-mixing as the primary source of evidence for differentiation (Arnberg & Arnberg, 1992;Lindholm & Padilla, 1978;Redlinger & Park, 1980;Vihman, 1982;Volterra & Taeschner, 1978). We here use the term codemixing, or simply mixing, to refer to the use of elements from both languages in the same utterance or stretch of conversation.…”