ERIC Number: ED058961
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Pages: 12
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Developing Bilingualism in a Two-Year Old Gujarati-English Learning Child.
Christian, Jane M.
This document is a report on English acquisition by a 2-year old Gujarati-speaking child. Overall language development is dealt with only partially. Two aspects of this development are concentrated on. These are (1) phonological accomodation of English and Gujarati in a changing and increasing system, and (2) concentration of English lexemes in specific semantic domains within a basically Gujarati-oriented grammar. It is clear that the child' comprehension of English is greater than either her grammatical competence or her ability to produce novel utterances. In Gujarati grammar, the child is beginning to acquire several inflectional patterns and is fully capable of appropriately constructing several types of Gujarati sentences. Gujarati and English are distantly related as Indo-European languages, and their phonological systems have many points of similarity. Though the child uses very few English verbs as yet, she responds appropriately to a considerable number in questions, imperatives, and requests. If she gives the Gujarati term for any object and is asked for the English, she will often supply it. There are some parallels between first and second language learning in this young child. Two strong complementary forces in her learning would seem to be the urge to collect more and more data, or perhaps the nearly complete receptivity to incoming information, along with the increasing need to simplify handling it by means of systematization. (CK)
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