9 - Conclusions and implications

Summary

Mother: [looking at child's diary] What's this word?

Child: You … you always talk about the children's language, and you don't know?

(Sophie 7;03;27)

With a quizzical look and a hint of disdain for her parents' academic enterprise, Sophie puts them on the spot. How much do we [now] know about our bilingual children's language? How much will we ever know? And how do we know it anyway?

Having written this book, we believe we at least know more than we did before regarding the process our six bilingual children, in particular our own three children, go through in acquiring two languages and the striking features that show up during this process. In this chapter we review the highlights of our investigation and explore some implications for research in bilingual acquisition and language contact. We have examined a range of grammatical features in the development of bilingual children exposed to Cantonese and English from birth. Though representing only a modest subset of the children's overall grammatical development, these provide a window into the processes in bilingual acquisition and language contact.

In chapter 1 we posed some basic questions:

• How do children acquire two languages simultaneously in the first years of life?

• Do the two languages develop independently or do they influence each other in systematic ways?

• How does bilingual development differ from acquisition of the same two languages by monolingual children?

• What role does bilingual development play in language contact and the development of contact languages?