This introductory textbook shows how children learn to understand and speak two languages against the backdrop of their language learning environments. A narrative around the bilingual development of four young children with different language profiles helps to explain the latest research findings in a lively and accessible manner.
Focusing on early bilingualism, this study investigates the intricacies of morphosyntactic development in young bilingual individuals. It delves into how children acquire and process grammatical structures in two languages, offering insights into the cognitive and linguistic factors influencing this complex developmental stage. Through detailed analysis, the research aims to enhance understanding of bilingual language acquisition and its implications for education and linguistics.
In the first decade of life, children become bilingual in different language learning environments. This Element explains how these different language learning settings dynamically affect bilingual children's language learning trajectories.
Increasingly, children grow up hearing two languages from birth. This comprehensive textbook explains how children learn to understand and speak those languages. It brings together both established knowledge and the latest findings about different areas of bilingual language development. It also includes new analyses of previously published materials. The book describes how bilingually raised children learn to understand and use sounds, words and sentences in two languages. A recurrent theme is the large degree of variation between bilingual children. This variation in how children develop bilingually reflects the variation in their language learning environments. Positive attitudes from the people in bilingual children's language learning environments and their recognition that child bilingualism is not monolingualism-times-two are the main ingredients ensuring that children grow up to be happy and expert speakers of two languages.
This volume discusses several facets of English in today's multilingual Europe. It emphasizes the interdependence between cultures, languages and situations that influence its use. This interdependence is particularly relevant to European settings where English is being learned as a second language. Such learning situations constitute the core focus of the book. The volume is unique in bringing together empirical studies examining factors that promote the learning of English in Europe. Rather than assuming that English is a threat to linguistic diversity and cultural independence, these studies discuss psycholinguistic factors such as the input, and sociolinguistic factors such as the type of English that is targeted in learning. The contributing authors are well-established specialists who have worked on multilingualism, English as a Lingua Franca and second language acquisition. The book will be of interest to applied linguists, sociolinguists and teachers of English as a foreign language.