Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T21:24:20.614Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Multi-word combinations and the emergence of differentiated ordering patterns in early trilingual development*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2009

SIMONA MONTANARI
SIMONA MONTANARI*
Affiliation:
California State University, Los Angeles
*
Address for correspondence: Deptartment of Child and Family Studies, California State University, Los Angeles, CA 90032, USA[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study examines word order differentiation in early trilingual development through an analysis of the combinations produced by a Tagalog–Spanish–English trilingual child with an MLU of less than 1.5. Same- and mixed-language combinations were tracked down from diary data and weekly recordings to assess (i) whether word order significantly varied cross-linguistically, and (ii) whether mixed utterances originated from vocabulary gaps rather than from an undifferentiated syntax. The results indicate that (a) argument/predicate sequences were differentially ordered depending on their language and following input-dependent preferences, (b) mixed utterances were generally caused by vocabulary gaps, and (c) they displayed the same order as those single-language combinations produced in the same language context. These findings suggest that evidence for early word order differentiation can be found before the appearance of inflectional morphology and even when three – rather than two – languages are being acquired, indicating that trilingual exposure does not slow down the process of differentiation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 12 , Issue 4 , October 2009 , pp. 503 - 519
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I am very grateful to Kathryn and her family who not only allowed me to enter into their private lives and thus undertake this investigation but they also helped with the data collection and transcription. I also thank the members of my dissertation committee, Elaine Andersen, Dany Bird, Jo Ann Farver, Toby Mintz, and especially Carmen Silva-Corvalán, for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks are also due to the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

References

Allen, S., Genesee, F., Fish, S. & Crago, M. (2002). Patterns of code-mixing in English–Inuktitut bilinguals. In Andronis, M., Ball, C., Elston, H. & Neuvel, S. (eds.), Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (vol. 2), pp. 171–188. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.Google Scholar
Barnes, J. D. (2006). Early trilingualism: A focus on questions. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blount, B. (1972). Parental speech and language acquisition. Anthropological Linguistics, 14 (4), 119–130.Google Scholar
Bosch, L. & Sebastián-Gallés, N. (2001). Early language differentiation in bilingual infants. In Cenoz & Genesee (eds.), pp. 71–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bowen, J. D. (1969). Beginning Tagalog. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Cenoz, J. & Genesee, F. (eds.) (2001). Trends in bilingual acquisition. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Comeau, L., Genesee, F. & Lapaquette, L. (2003). The Modeling Hypothesis and child bilingual codemixing. International Journal of Bilingualism, 7 (2), 113–126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Comrie, B. (1989). Language universals and linguistic typology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Cruz-Ferreira, M. (2006). Three is a crowd? Acquiring Portuguese in a trilingual environment. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crystal, D. (1980). A first dictionary of linguistics and phonetics. London: André Deutsch.Google Scholar
De Houwer, A. (1990). The acquisition of two languages from birth: A case study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Houwer, A. (2005). Early bilingual acquisition: Focus on morphosyntax and the separate development hypothesis. In Kroll, J. F. & de Groot, A. M. B. (eds.), Handbook of bilingualism: Psycholinguistic approaches, pp. 30–48. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Deuchar, M. & Quay, S. (2000). Bilingual acquisition: Theoretical implications of a case study. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Genesee, F. (1989). Early bilingual development: One language or two? Journal of Child Language, 16, 161–179.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Genesee, F., Nicoladis, E. & Paradis, J. (1995). Language differentiation in early bilingual development. Journal of Child Language, 22, 611–631.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Holowka, S., Brosseau-Lapré, F. & Petitto, L. A. (2002). Semantic and conceptual knowledge underlying bilingual babies’ first signs and words. Language Learning, 52 (2), 205–262.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Köppe, R. (1996). Language differentiation in bilingual children: The development of grammatical and pragmatic competence. Linguistics, 34, 927–954.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Köppe, R. (1997). Sprachentrennung im frühen bilingualen Erstspracherwerb Französisch/Deutsch. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar
Kroeger, P. (1993). Phrase structure and grammatical relations in Tagalog. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Lanza, E. (1992). Can bilingual two-year-olds code-switch? Journal of Child Language, 19, 633–658.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lanza, E. (1997a). Language contact in bilingual two-year-olds and code-switching: Language encounters of a different kind? International Journal of Bilingualism, 1, 135–162.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lanza, E. (1997b). Language mixing in infant bilingualism: A sociolinguistic perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maneva, B. & Genesee, F. (2002). Bilingual babbling: Evidence for language differentiation in dual language acquisition. In Skarabela, B., Fish, S. & Do, A. H.-J. (eds.), Proceedings of the 26th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, pp. 383–392. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Matthews, S. & Yip, V. (2003). Relative clauses in early bilingual development: Transfer and universals. In Ramat, A. G. (ed.), Typology and second language acquisition, pp. 39–81. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Meisel, J. M. (1989). Early differentiation of languages in bilingual children. In Hyltenstam, K. & Obler, L. (eds.), Bilingualism across the lifespan: Aspects of acquisition, maturity, and loss, pp. 13–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meisel, J. M. (ed.) (1990). Two first languages: Early grammatical development in bilingual children. Dordrecht: Foris.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meisel, J. M. (ed.) (1994a). Bilingual first language acquisition: French and German grammatical development. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meisel, J. M. (1994b). Code-switching in young bilingual children: The acquisition of grammatical constraints. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 16, 413–441.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meisel, J. M. (2001). The simultaneous acquisition of two first languages: Early differentiation and subsequent development of grammars. In Cenoz & Genesee (eds.), pp. 11–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Montanari, S. (2006). Language differentiation in early trilingual development: Evidence from a case study. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern California.Google Scholar
Montanari, S. (2008). Pragmatic differentiation in early trilingual development. Journal of Child Language, doi:10.1017/S0305000908009112, published online by Cambridge University Press, 12 November 2008. Print publication in 2009, Journal of Child Language, 36 (3), 495–527.Google ScholarPubMed
Nicoladis, E. & Genesee, F. (1996). A longitudinal study of language differentiation in young bilingual children. Language Learning, 46 (3), 439–464.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nicoladis, E. & Secco, G. (2000). The role of a child's productive vocabulary in the language choice of a bilingual family. First Language, 28, 3–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ochs, E. (1988). Culture and language development: Language acquisition and language socialization in a Samoan village. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Paradis, J. (2001). Do bilingual two-year-olds have separate phonological systems? International Journal of Bilingualism, 5 (1), 19–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J. & Genesee, F. (1996). Syntactic acquisition in bilingual children: Autonomous or independent? Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 18, 1–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J. & Genesee, F. (1997). On continuity and the emergence of functional categories in bilingual first language acquisition. Language Acquisition, 6 (2), 91–124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J., Nicoladis, E. & Genesee, F. (2000). Early emergence of structural constraints on code-mixing: Evidence from French–English bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 3 (3), 245–261.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pearson, B. Z., Fernández, S. C. & Oller, D. K. (1995). Cross-language synonyms in the lexicons of bilingual infants: One system or two? Journal of Child Language, 22, 345–368.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Quay, S. (2001). Managing linguistic boundaries in early trilingual development. In Cenoz & Genesee (eds.), pp. 149–199.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quay, S. (2008). Dinner conversations with a trilingual two-year-old: Language socialization in a multilingual context. First Language, 28 (1), 5–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Radford, A. (1990). Syntactic theory and the acquisition of English syntax. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Redlinger, W. E. & Park, T.-Z. (1980). Language mixing in young bilinguals. Journal of Child Language, 26, 177–185.Google Scholar
Schachter, P. (1976). The subject in Philippine languages: Topic, actor, actor-topic, or none of the above. In Li, C. N. (ed.), Subject and topic, pp. 491–518. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Schachter, P. & Otanes, F. T. (1972). Tagalog reference grammar. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schnitzer, M. L. & Krasinski, E. (1994). The development of segmental phonological production in a bilingual child. Journal of Child Language, 21, 585–622.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Segalowitz, N. S. & Galang, R. G. (1978). Agent–patient word-order preference in the acquisition of Tagalog. Journal of Child Language, 5, 47–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition, 74, 209–253.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2006). Acquiring linguistic constructions. In Damon, W. & Lerner, R. M (series eds.) and D. Kuhn & R. S. Siegler (vol. eds.), Handbook of child psychology (vol. 2): Cognition, perception and language (6th edn.), pp. 255–298. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. & Brooks, P. (1999). Early syntactic development: A Construction Grammar approach. In Barrett, M. (ed.), The development of language, pp. 161–190. Hove: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Vihman, M. M. (1985). Language differentiation by the bilingual infant. Journal of Child Language, 12, 297–324.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vogel, I. (1975). One system or two: An analysis of a two-year-old Romanian–English bilingual's phonology. Papers and Reports on Child Language, 9, 43–62.Google Scholar
Volterra, V. & Taeschner, T. (1978). The acquisition and development of language by bilingual children. Journal of Child Language, 5, 311–326.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zagona, K. (2002). The syntax of Spanish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar