Language and the mind Prof. R. Hickey SS 2006 Types of Bilingual Acquisition in Childhood Sabine Rubach Hauptstudium LN

Types of Bilingual Acquisition in Childhood Type 1: “One Person – One Language” Type 2: “Non-dominant Home Language” / “One Language – One Environment” Type 3: “Non – dominant Home Language without Community Support”

Type 4: “Double Non-dominant Home Language without Community Support” Type 5: ‘‘Non – native Parents’’ Type 6: “Mixed languages”

Type 1: “One Person – One Language” Parents: have different native languages with each having some degree of competence in the other’s language Community: the language of one of the parents is the dominant language of the community Strategy: the parents each speak their own language to the child from birth

Type 1: “One Person – One Language” Study: Author: Leopold ( ) Language: mother (English ) Language: father (German) Community: English

Type 1: “One Person – One Language” Leopold studied the acqusition of English and German by his daughter Hildegard Leopold spoke only German to his wife and to Hildegard Mrs Leopold (American of German descent) spoke only English The family lived in the US

Type 1: “One Person – One Language” Leopold made a complete record of Hildegard’s speech in a diary H did not seperate the two languages in her vocabulary, and she did not associate the languages with specific persons during the first 2 years H had a vocabulary of 377 words

Type 1: “One Person – One Language” of her active verbs, 19 percent had both English and German prototypes she acquired most of them during a three- month visit in Germany when she was 1.0 In her third year H treated the two languages as a separate linguistic system and was able to translate between them

Type 1: “One Person – One Language” After she returned to the US, she attended school and English became her dominant language Leopold observed more evidence of interference, mostly at the level of vocabulary eg: “But manchmal I make mistakes, in German and in English” “ Foolish Kinder have to go to school”

Type 1: “One Person – One Language” Leopold believed that bilingualism has positive advantages he said that H came to seperate word from referent at an early stage and was aware of the arbitrary nature of the relationship between word and meaning through using two languages. Monolingual children aren’t aware of this in such an early stage of development

Type 2: “Non-dominant Home Language” / “One Language – One Environment” Parents: the parents have different native languages Community: the language of one of the parents is the dominant language of the community Strategy: both parents speak the non – dominant language to the child, who is fully exposed to the dominant language only when outside the home, and in particular in nursery school

Type 2: “Non-dominant Home Language” / “One Language – One Environment” Study: Author: Fantini (1985) Language: mother (Spanish) Language: father (English) Community: English

Type 2: “Non-dominant Home Language” / “One Language – One Environment” Fantini examined his son Mario, who spoke Spanish with his mother and English with his father Only Spanish was spoken at home, by both, father and mother Mario learned English when he was 2.6 and Spanish when he was 1.4

Type 2: “Non-dominant Home Language” / “One Language – One Environment” Comparing to Hildegard, who used at the end of her second year 337 words Mario used only 21 words By the age of 3.0 he had a productive lexicon of 503 words at age 3.6 Mario became aware of the names of the two languages at the age of 5.0 Mario was bilingual and bicultural with full awareness on these facts

Type 3: “Non – dominant Home Language without Community Support” Parents: they share the same native language Community: the dominant language is not that of the parents Strategy: the parents speak their own language to their child

Type 3: “Non – dominant Home Language without Community Support” Study: Author: Oskaar (1977) Language: mother (Estonian) Language: father (Estonian) Community: Swedish/ German

Type 3: “Non – dominant Home Language without Community Support” The study of Oskaar (1977) shows that children can learn three languages simultaneously Oskaar’s son was 3.11 when he came to Germany and he was raised bilingually in Swedish and Estonian German became his third language

Type 4: „Double Non-dominant Home Language without Community Support“ Parents: have different native languages Community: the dominant language is different from either of the parents’ languages Strategy: the parents each speak their own language to the child

Non-dominant Type 4: „Double Home Language without Community Support“ Study: Author: Elwert (1959) Language: mother (English) Language: father (German) Community: Italian

Type 4: „Double Non-dominant Home Language without Community Support“ Elwert was brought up in Italy and addressed in three languages from birth He doesn’t remember at what stage he became aware that he spoke different languages it is difficult for him to say which of the languages is his mother tongue

Type 5: ‘‘Non – native Parents’’ Parents : share the same native language Community: the dominant language is the same as that of the parents Strategy: One of the parents always addresses the child in a language which is not his/her native language

Type 5: ‘‘Non – native Parents’’ Study: Author: Saunders (1982) Language: mother (English) Language: father (English) (German) Community: English

Type 5: ‘‘Non – native Parents’’ Saunders divides the child’s learning process into a three stage developmental sequence Stage 1 : lasts from the onset of speech until about age 2.0. the majority of the child’s utterances consists of one word until about 1.6.

Type 5: ‘‘Non – native Parents’’ Stage 2: the child uses utterances which contain words from both languages, but will increasingly differentiate the languages according to person and context Stage 3: the child differentiates the two linguistic systems

Type 6: “Mixed languages” Parents: are bilingual Community: Sectors of community may also be bilingual Strategy: Parents code-switch and mix languages

Type 6: “Mixed languages” Study: Author: Tabouret-Keller (1962) Language: mother (French/German) Language: father (French/German) Community: French/German

Type 6: “Mixed languages” both parents mixed both languages in speaking to their child at 2.0 the child had a much larger French than German vocabulary and about 60 percent of the sentences were mixed more code-switching than the other bilingual children