Introducing Bilingual First Language Acquisition

What is Bilingual First Language Acquisition (BFLA)?

The term

The process

BFLA, MFLA and ESLA

The family as the primary socialization unit for BFLA

Is BFLA a common phenomenon?

A brief history of the study of BFLA

More than 50 years ago

Renewed interest after a fairly quiet time

Interest from the public at large

The foundations laid in the 1980s

An explosion of research interest

BFLA research today

Summary box

Suggestions for study activities

Recommended reading

What is Bilingual First Language Acquisition (BFLA)?

The term

Bilingual First Language Acquisition (BFLA) is the development of language in young children who hear two languages spoken to them from birth. BFLA children are learning two first languages. There is no chronological difference between the two languages in terms of when the children started to hear them. This is why in referring to these languages it is best to use a notation that does not imply a notion of 'first' and 'second'. Following Wölck (1987/88) I will refer to BFLA children's two languages as Language A and Language Alpha.

Although many processes of the acquisition of three languages from birth may be very similar to what happens when a child is learning just two, empirical research on trilingual acquisition is just starting to receive serious research consideration. It is too early to make any generalizations based on the few existing studies so far. This book, then, will use the term 'bilingual' to refer just to the use of two languages, rather than to also more than two.

It appears that Merrill Swain was the first to introduce the term Bilingual First Language Acquisition. Swain used this term in a brief summary of her dissertation work (Swain, 1976). As far as I have been able to determine, however, the term did not appear in print again until Jürgen Meisel briefly used it in his much cited chapter published in 1989. I took up his lead and proposed a definition for this 'new' term in my case study of a Dutch – English bilingual child (De Houwer, 1990). Prior to this, various terms were used to cover the concept of BFLA, but many of these also referred to more than just BFLA. It was often impossible to really know what scholars meant when they wrote of 'incipient bilingualism', 'childhood bilingualism' or 'simultaneous bilingualism'. The term BFLA is now widely accepted and has the advantage of having a clear definition.

The process

The fact that BFLA children hear Language A and Language Alpha from birth does not necessarily mean that they will actually learn to speak these two languages. It is not uncommon for BFLA children to speak just one of the languages they have been addressed in since birth. When BFLA children understand two languages but speak only one, they may be called 'passive' bilinguals, although there is nothing passive about understanding two languages and speaking one. If BFLA children do not learn to understand and/or speak either of the languages spoken to them, this is a cause for concern: maybe they have a hearing problem, or maybe there are neurological problems. Just as in children raised with just one language who do not understand much language and/or do not speak, the lack of comprehension and/or speech in any language in BFLA children is a severe problem and needs to be discussed with a speech and language pathologist. InBox 1.1 I outline four main patterns of language use in BFLA children and briefly evaluate them.

The expectation for normally developing BFLA children, then, is that they will learn to understand two languages from early on and speak both languages, or just one of them (Patterns 1 and 2 in Box 1.1). In Box 1.2 I give an example for Pattern 1 and Pattern 2. Chapter 2 gives a more in-depth overview of bilingual children's linguistic skills.

People often assume that BFLA children know each of their languages equally well. This is not always the case, though. When we look at children's skills in a language we need to distinguish between comprehension and production.

For language comprehension, there could be large differences between a child's two languages in how well they are understood. However, because of the small number of studies on comprehension in BFLA children we don't really know just how large these differences can be and whether it is possible that a child understands very little of one language but a whole lot of another, even though he or she has heard both of them frequently from birth. What little empirical research is available, however, suggests that there is a lot of variation between children in how many words they understand in each of their languages. This research is reviewed in Chapter 6 on the lexicon, which summarizes the research on the kinds and numbers of words that bilingual children know.

For language production or speaking, there is ample evidence for large, and quite normal, differences between BFLA children's two languages: there are children who do not speak Language A at all but who are fluent in Language Alpha. At the other end of the continuum there are children who are more or less equally fluent in Language A and Language Alpha, and then there are all the variations between these two extremes, with children speaking one language better than the other to various degrees.

It is not easy, however, to measure differences in how well children speak a particular language (I discuss this in more detail in Chapter 3). But there is a consensus in the field that BFLA children who actively speak two languages do not necessarily speak them equally well. A possible reason for this may be that children do not hear each of their languages to the same extent. I will return to this issue of variable knowledge throughout the book.

BFLA, MFLA and ESLA

Note that BFLA...