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Bilingual language input environments, intake, maturity and practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2016

ANNICK DE HOUWER
ANNICK DE HOUWER*
Affiliation:
University of Erfurt
*
Address for correspondence: Annick De Houwer, Nordhäuserstraße 63, D-99089 Erfurt, Germany[email protected]
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Extract

Before bilingual children can say anything, they must learn to distinguish between the two languages that are spoken to them, and they must learn to make useful perceptual distinctions in each of them in order to understand what is said to them. Conversational interaction and non-verbal communication, such as pointing and gaze, aid children in attending to and processing aspects of their “language input environment” (De Houwer, 2009, 2011), “exposure” in Carroll's terms. As Carroll points out, children must build up their linguistic categories based on their intrinsically category-free “exposure”: they must process speech to acquire language. This reminds me of Wijnen's (2000) notion of language intake, which is the “data base children use to derive hypotheses on the structure of the target grammar” (p. 174), and which constitutes children's selection from what I will continue to call input, pace Carroll.

Keywords

bilingual childrenlanguage input
Type
Peer Commentaries
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 19 - 20
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

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