A bilingual child's acquisition of Mandarin and English: Same or different rate?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25170/ijelt.v7i2.1534Keywords:
blingual language acquisition, Malaysia, Mandarin, English, grammarAbstract
This paper is descriptive in nature. It looks at the utterances of one Malaysian-Chinese bilingual child who was specifically spoken to in Mandarin and English from birth. The aim of this paper is to highlight the different speech components present in the two languages. There is some evidence to show that the child's preferred language is not necessarily the dominant language. The child was observed closely by the researcher cum mother over a period of seven months. Initial utterances were tape recorded but later discarded due to impracticality. Subsequent utterances were then spontaneously recorded into journals as and when they occurred within the child’s home with details such as time, date, place and participants indicated. Transcribed orthographically, data were then categorized according to the languages heard and then the speech components (see Hoff, 2009; Foster -Cohen, 1999; Crystal, 1997) respectively. A frequency count of all these utterances suggests that 59% of the child’s utterances were in English while 19% were in Mandarin (dominant language) with smaller percentages subscribing to the various environmental languages. Data also indicate that more nouns were used in English and but slightly more verbs and noun phrases were used in Mandarin. This phenomenon was also used as a determinant to gauge the rate of acquisition of the two languages. A very small percentage of the child’s data were also articulated as complete sentences but this was done in mixed languages, which could be a typical phenomenon of bilingual language acquisition at the early stage.
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Slobin, D. I. (1988). Confessions of a wayward Chomskyan. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development, 27, 131-136.
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Taeschner, T. (1983). The sun is feminine: A study on language acquisition in bilingual children. Berlin: Springer-Verlog.
Vihman, M. M. (1985). Language differentiation by the bilingual infant. Journal of Child Language, 12, 297-324.
Volterra, V., & Taeschner, T. (1978). The acquisition and development of language by bilingual children. Journal of Child Language, 5(2), 311-26.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). The genetic roots of thought and speech. In A. Kozulin (Ed.), Thought and language. MA: MIT Press.
Yip, V., & Matthews, S. (2007). The bilingual child: Early development and language contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bates, E., Marchman, V., Thal, D., Fenson, L., Dale, P. S., Reznick, J. S., Reilly, J., & Hartung, J. (1994). Developmental and stylistic variation in the composition of early vocabulary. Journal of Child Language, 21, 85-123.
Bellugi, U., & Brown, R. (1964). The acquisition of language. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Benedict, H. (1979). Early lexical development: Comprehension and production. Journal of Child Language, 6, 183-200.
Bowerman, M. (1978). The acquisition of word meaning: An investigation into dome current conflicts. In N. Waterson & C. Snow (Eds.), The development of communication, pp. 263-287. New York: John Wiley.
Brown, R. W. (1973). A first language: The early stages. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Clark, E. V. (1979). Building a vocabulary for objects, actions and relations. In P. Fletcher & M. Garman (Eds.), Language acquisition, pp. 149-160. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Crystal, D. (1997). The Cambridge encyclopedia of language (2 ed).
DeHouwer, A. (1990). The acquisition of two languages from birth: A case study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Deuchar, M., & Quay, S. (1999). Language choice in the earliest utterances: A case study with methodological implications, Journal of Child Language, 26, 461-475. United Kingdom: CUP.
Dromi, E. (1987). Early lexical development. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Fantini, A. E. (1978). Language acquisition of a bilingual child: A sociolinguistic perspective (To age 5). PhD. Dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School, University of Texas, Austin.
Fantini, A. E. (1985). Language acquisition of a bilingual child: A sociolinguistic perspective. San Diego, CA.: College Hill Press.
Fedio. P., August, A., Myatt, C., Kertzman, C., Miletich, R., Snyder, P., Sato, S., & Kafta, C. (1992). Functional localisation of languages in a bilingual patient with intracaratid amytal, subdural electrical stimulation, and positron emission topography. Paper presented at the International Neuropsychological Society, San Diego, CA.
Foster-Cohen, S. H. (1999). An introduction to child language development. New York: Addison Wesley Longman.
Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., & Hyams, N. (2003). An introduction to language (7th ed). Boston: Thomson.
Genesee, F. (1989). Early bilingual development: One language or two? Journal of Child Language, 16, 161-179.
Gentner, D. (1982). Why nouns are learned before verbs: Linguistic relativity versus natural partitioning.In S. A. Kucaj II (Ed.), Language development, Vol. 2, Language thought and culture. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Gentner, D., & Boroditsky, L. (2001). Individuation, relational relativity and early word learning. In M. Bowerman & S. Levinson (Eds.), Language acquisition and conceptual development. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Goldin-Meadow, S., Seligman, M. E. P., & Gelman, R. (1976). Language in the two-year old: Receptive and productive stages. Cognition, 4(2), 189-202.
Goodz, N. (1994). Interactions between parents and children in bilingual families. In F. Genesee, (Ed.), Education in second language children. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hall, D. G. & Waxman, S. R. (2004). Weaving a lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hoff, E. (2009). Language development. Australia: Wadsworth Thomson Learning.
Hoffman, C. (1991). An introduction to bilingualism. London, N.Y.: Longman.
Kuang, C.H. (2006).Signs of Becoming Bilingual: A study of a Malaysian child under two. In M.K. David (Ed.) Language choices and discourse of Malaysian families case studies of families in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and
Research Development Centre pp 76-100 (Non-ISI/Non-SCOPUS Cited Publication).
Lanza, E. (1997). Language mixing in infant bilingualism: A sociolinguistic perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Leopold, W. (1939-1949). Speech development of a bilingual child: A linguist’s record.
Volume 1: Vocabulary growth in the first two years.
Volume 2: Sound learning in the first two years. (1947)
Volume 3: Grammar and general problems in the first two years. (1949) Evanston, III: Northwestern University Press.
Naigles, L. R., & Hoff, E. (2006). Verbs at the beginning: Parallels between comprehension and input. In K. Hirsh-Pasek & R. M. Golinkoff (Eds.), Action Meets Words: How Children Learn Verbs, pp. 336-363. New York: Oxford University Press.
Nelson, K. (1973). Structure and strategy in learning to talk. Monographs of the Science for Research in Child Development, 38, 1-137.
Packer, M. (2001). Two-word utterances. http://www.mathcs.duq.edu/~packer/Courses/Psy598/Two%20word%20utterances.pdf (Retrieved November 16, 2011).
Piaget, J. (1955). The language and thought of the child. In T. K. Crowl, Kaminsky, & D. M. Podell (1997) (Eds.), Educational psychology: Windows on teaching, USA: Brown and Benchmark.
Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct. New York: W. Morrow & Co.
Redlinger, W., & Park, T. Z. (1980). Language mixing in young bilinguals. Journal of Child Language, 7, 337-362.
Ronjat, J. (1913). Le development de langae observé chez un enfant bilingue. In J. Lyon (Ed.), (1996), Becoming bilingual: Language acquisition in a bilingual community. USA: Multilingual Matters Ltd.
Saville-Troike, M. (2006). Introducing second language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Soriente, A. (2006). Dominance and language choice in an Indonesian-Italian bilingual child. In Vliegen, M. (ed.). Variation in sprachtheorie und spracherwerb Akten des 39. Linguistischen Kolloquiums in Amsterdam 2004.
Schlyter, S. (1987). Language mixing and linguistic level in three bilingual children. Working Papers in Bilingualism, 7, 29-48.
Slobin, D. I. (1988). Confessions of a wayward Chomskyan. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development, 27, 131-136.
Sriniwass, S. (2007). A child's model for social interaction: The transition to the adult linguistic system. Vol 17., Journal of Modern Languages. In Azirah Hashim et.al (eds.) pp 31-60.
Swain, M., & Wesche, M. (1975). Linguistic interaction: Case study of a bilingual child. Language Sciences, 37, 17-22.
Taeschner, T. (1983). The sun is feminine: A study on language acquisition in bilingual children. Berlin: Springer-Verlog.
Vihman, M. M. (1985). Language differentiation by the bilingual infant. Journal of Child Language, 12, 297-324.
Volterra, V., & Taeschner, T. (1978). The acquisition and development of language by bilingual children. Journal of Child Language, 5(2), 311-26.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). The genetic roots of thought and speech. In A. Kozulin (Ed.), Thought and language. MA: MIT Press.
Yip, V., & Matthews, S. (2007). The bilingual child: Early development and language contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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2011-10-31
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