CRITERIOS DE EVALUACIÓN

In this chapter, I have introduced the alterative accounts that constructivist and generativist- nativist approaches give of the acquisition processes that lead to the formation of the adult mental grammar. Prima facie, how to tease apart empirically a constructivist account of the acquisition of inflectional morphology from a generativist-nativist account is a complicated issue. It is complicated by the fact that, on any account, children must learn inflections gradually and based on the input. However, the competing assumptions the two accounts make about children’s initial state have consequences for the strategy each theory claims as underlying the acquisition of inflectional forms. On constructivist accounts, learning of inflections, as any other aspect of language learning, is strictly item-based; hence, it happens on a word-by-word basis almost. In the initial stages of acquisition, generalisations are not in place and early correct performance simply reflects rote learning. This means that inflections are not used productively, i.e., in an adult-like fashion. The opposite is true of generativist-nativist accounts, where acquisition is gradual in the sense that inflectional paradigms are not expected to be acquired all at once, but the acquisition of each paradigm happens on an inflection-by-inflection basis. However, the acquisition of each individual inflection is less gradual because Inflection is an innate functional category and, as soon as children identify the phonological shapes that it takes in their input language, they are able

to make a morphological analysis of inflected items. The competing predictions about the emergence of inflectional morphology in the BFLA setting are outlined in the fourth chapter. In the next chapter, I review current research on the acquisition of two languages from birth.              

CHAPTER 2

Bilingual first language acquisition

2.1 Introduction

Research has shown that the acquisition of two languages from birth can be regarded as an instance of the acquisition of two native languages. This is why this type of linguistic development is often labelled as Bilingual First Language Acquisition or BFLA (Meisel, 1989). According to Meisel (2001), BFLA can also entail the acquisition of more than two languages, as well as the acquisition of a spoken and a signed language. Several research findings underpin this conclusion. It has been argued that BFLA children attain native competence in each language by mere exposure to the input (e.g., De Houwer, 1990). It has been shown that the developmental sequences that lead to this grammatical knowledge are the same as those established for monolingual acquirers of each language, and that the achievement of each linguistic milestone falls, in each language, within the time range regarded as normal in monolingual development (e.g., De Houwer, 1990, 1995; Sinka & Schelletter, 1998; Petitto & Kovelman, 2003; Meisel, 2004; Petitto, Katerelos, Levy, Gauna, Tétrault & Ferraro, 2001). The equivalence between the acquisition of one and two first languages is evident even for children affected by specific language impairment (SLI). French-English bilingual six-year-olds with SLI have been shown to display the same level of inaccuracy with verb morphology as monolingual children with SLI, in each language (Paradis, Crago, Genesee & Rice, 2003). At the same time, once again paralleling monolingual children with SLI, they exhibit greater accuracy with noun morphology. As the authors point out, the crucial implication of this finding is that, even under conditions of language impairment, BFLA does not alter nor delay the acquisition process.

Considerations concerning human biology and socio-cultural contexts of life seem to allow for an overturning of the once dominant assumption that, in language development, monolingual acquisition is the norm and bilingual acquisition is a deviation from that norm (e.g., Volterra & Taeschner, 1978; Vihman, 1985), and hence, challenging to the point of being detrimental and to be avoided. Neuro-imaging studies (Kovelman, Baker & Petitto, 2008; Kovelman, Shalinsky, Berens & Petitto, 2008) show a greater extent

of activation of the classic language-dedicated brain areas in highly proficient, early exposed young bilingual adults (mean age, 20 years old) processing English as compared with monolinguals processing English. As highlighted by the authors, this finding seems to suggest that simultaneous bilinguals recruit a larger portion of the neural tissue underlying language processing than monolinguals, as if monolinguals did not fully exploit the language processing brain potential. The authors go as far as to suggest that the human brain might be biologically set for the acquisition of multiple native languages.

Socio-culturally, it has been pointed out that bilingualism is not at all uncommon. Although there are not official statistics, it can be speculated that, across the world, linguistically heterogeneous communities, where children are simultaneously exposed to two or more languages from infancy, are as many as or even more numerous than monolingual communities (Tucker, 1998). Biologically, children are not programmed to acquire any specific language, as they need to acquire, and inevitably3

do so, the language of the community in which they grow up. Following the same line of reasoning, it cannot be argued that they are programmed to acquire only one native language, as opposed to two (or more), because they could very well be born into a linguistically heterogeneous community.

In this chapter, I first focus on terminological issues in BFLA acquisition; then, I outline current research views on language separation, language interaction and what similarities can be identified between monolingual and bilingual first language acquisition.