The Bilingual Child: Early Development and Language Contact (Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact) - Hardcover

Yip, Virginia; Matthews, Stephen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521836174 ISBN 13: 9780521836173

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2007

Synopsis

How does a child become bilingual? The answer to this intriguing question remains largely a mystery, not least because it has been far less extensively researched than the process of mastering a first language. Drawing on new studies of children exposed to two languages from birth (English and Cantonese), this book demonstrates how childhood bilingualism develops naturally in response to the two languages in the children's environment. While each bilingual child's profile is unique, the children studied are shown to develop quite differently from monolingual children. The authors demonstrate significant interactions between the children's developing grammars, as well as the important role played by language dominance in their bilingual development. Based on original research and using findings from the largest available multimedia bilingual corpus, the book will be welcomed by students and scholars working in child language acquisition, bilingualism and language contact.

About this title

About the Authors

Virginia Yip is Professor in Linguistics and Modern Languages at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Stephen Matthews is Associate Professor in Linguistics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521836174
• ISBN 13: 9780521836173
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320