Political and economic globalization, together with constant technological advances, has resulted in unprecedented levels of international human mobility. As a result, societies are increasingly intercultural. Nowhere is this interculturality more pervasive than in digital discourse (traditionally known as computer-mediated communication or CMC), where interlocutors from different cultural backgrounds may interact on global platforms and social networking sites such as Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube, to name but a few. Intercultural communication, however, poses interlocutors with serious challenges to overcome, such as differences in their value systems, and diverging communication styles and behaviours. All of them can easily lead to miscommunication and conflict between cultural groups, both within and across societies, as well as the perpetuation of cultural stereotypes. Yet, most research on CMC to date has focused on monocultural studies or cross-cultural comparisons while intercultural communication in CMC is still rather under-researched. Keeping the above in mind, the present chapter aims to review the research that has been carried out so far in the field of digital discourse with a special focus on intercultural communication, as well as to provide readers with avenues for future research in this burgeoning field.

The evolution and conceptualization of bi- and multilingual child language development is in focus in this chapter. I describe the history of infant bilingualism research related to the unitary vs. separated systems hypotheses. I review the effect of infant bi- and multilingualism on cognitive development. In the description of language perception, I rely on neurolinguistic findings, while in the emergence of speech I give a brief analysis of the language development of some multilingual children. I provide examples at the phonetic-phonological and lexical levels as well as evidence of multilingual awareness.

The relationship between early multilingual learning and metalinguistic awareness is a particularly intriguing one. Not surprisingly, research into the effects of multilingualism on children’s linguistic development and awareness of language has attracted a lot of attention over the past years and decades as studies have found both positive effects of multilingualism on the development of metalinguistic awareness, and also facilitative effects of metalinguistic awareness on language learning. In the recent literature, metalinguistic awareness has been linked to important qualitative changes in the language and learning processes of multilinguals.