The Cross-Linguistic Study of Bilingual Development.

In this volume, recent studies on bilingual development are presented. Previous studies on bilingual development give no reason to believe that the process of language acquisition in bilinguals and monolinguals is different in its basic features. The essential difference is that bilingual children are confronted with two sets of input and that they have the additional task of distinguishing the two language systems. However, the very complex process of learning to separate two different languages is still poorly understood. It remains unclear what sort of operating principles children use while acquiring two languages at the same time. It is also unclear under what conditions processes of language transfer and code mixing occur. Moreover, most of the studies that have been conducted so far were limited in their scope, given the fact that the languages under consideration were highly related. In the present volume, the simultaneous or successive acquisition of two unrelated languages are dealt with. In order to allow for crosslinguistic comparisons, different language varieties in various countries are taken into account. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 gives an overview of studies on early bilingual development. The focus of Part 2 is on bilingual development at school age and beyond. The analysis of learner data in two unrelated languages should give new perspectives on the role of structural properties of these languages in the process of acquisition.