Contexts of limited input such as trilingual families where a language is not spoken in the wider community but only by a reduced number of speakers in the home provide a unique opportunity to examine closely the relationship between a child's input and what she learns to say. Barnes reported on the relationship between maternal input and a…

This study compared narratives in Spanish, Basque, and English of a 5-year-old trilingual child. The child produced narratives of a familiar story, learned through an English video recording, in each language while looking at a printed version of the story. All interlocutors were adult native speakers of the languages, well known to the child. The…