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…

A study examined repair sequences in talk between two German-English bilingual children and between parent and child within a nuclear family in which German is generally spoken. Data were drawn from tape recordings and developmental diaries kept on the two preschool children. Patterns of parent-child and child-child corrections were examined. In…

Investigated whether crosslinguistic interference occurs in the domain of subject realization in Spanish in a bilingual (Spanish-English) acquisition context. Also explored whether the source of the interference is due to child-internal crosslanguage contact between English and Spanish or due to the nature of the language input in a bilingual…

An overview of bilingualism and language acquisition is followed by a description of a research study of the simultaneous acquisition of Spanish and English in three children. (RM)

The spontaneous speech of a six-year-old bilingual child was analyzed for this study. The child has lived in the United States and English is her primary language but her parents speak only French in the home and she has spent several months in France during three visits there. The data used in this study were collected in the child's home by her…

This paper focuses on lexical mixing and language switching in a French-English bilingual Canadian child. (CHK)

Presents longitudinal data from simultaneously bilingual German-English children with respect to development of negation and syntactically related modal particles. Data provide evidence for both language separation and cross-linguistic influence. Relative order of verbs and sequential modifiers appears not to be a principled syntactic operation,…

This study documents the instances of code-switching and interference in the speech of a bilingual child living in Rome, Italy, with his American mother and Italian father. (CFM)

The linguistic interactions in the speech of bilingual children is systematically examined to determine their ability to differentiate between their two language systems. The speech samples of eighteen bilingual (Spanish-English) children aged two to six were examined for instances of deviation from the norms of the language of utterance due to…

Describes the language development of two children, now aged 5 and 8, who acquired two languages--Spanish and German--simultaneously from birth and a third--English--when very young. Focuses on the following factors: patterns of interference, code switching, language dominance, the role of parents, the social environment, and the child's…

This study presents phonological and lexical data describing the speech of a two-year-old acquiring English and French simultaneously. After establishing the child's phonological system(s), four categories of lexical items are described: (1) the child knows and uses both the English and French lexical item; (2) the child is confused by identical…

Analyzes the language acquisition of a bilingual (Estonian/English) child. Discusses his preference for acquiring whole words as opposed to inflections and offers several possible reasons for this particular learning strategy. (EKN)

The correlation between a bilingual's usage of grammatical morphemes from one of his/her languages and his/her language dominance is examined. The subject is a three-year-old Danish/English bilingual who code-switches at the morpheme level even though she has never been exposed to a code-switching bilingual community. Co-occurrence restrictions…

Investigates the potential interference between the grammars of French-English bilingual children, ages two to three years. The study examined their acquisition of functional categories, specifically the properties of INFL (finiteness and agreement) and negation. Results indicate that these children evidence no transfer, acceleration, or delay in…