What Bilingualism Tells us About Phonological Acquisition (original) (raw)

The study of bilingual language acquisition is a daunting area of research. First, there is the extensive number of possible language combinations. For example, suppose we restrict our initial investigations into the one hundred most linguistically diverse languages in the world. The permutation of those languages leads to 4,950 bilingual contexts. Next, each of these bilingual contexts needs to be examined for a wide range of research variables. There is the issue of when the child becomes bilingual, i.e. whether acquisition of the languages is simultaneous or dual, where simultaneous means both languages are present from birth, and dual means that the second language begins acquisition later, say from age three on. If the latter, there is the variable of which language is acquired earlier. Then we need to consider the contexts of the input in these bilingual contexts. Does the child hear one and/or both languages from a single speaker or multiple speakers? There are design issues concerning the number of necessary participants, and whether to conduct case studies or cross sectional studies. We also have the various components of language (e.g., phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics) and the range of research questions, some of which are discussed below, to consider. When the math is done, the number of possible bilingual studies approaches one million. From this perspective, every study on bilingual language acquisition is one in a million!