Does Bilingual First Language Acquisition imply a mixed period ...

Abstract
Does Bilingual First Language Acquisition imply a mixed period phase?
Evidence from a Portuguese-Polish bilingual child
Batoréo, Hanna
Open University of Lisbon
In the present paper it is our purpose to look at a case study of a bilingual Portuguese-Polish
child, examining and discussing psycholinguistic processes of acquisition and production in
BFLA from a usage-based perspective. The term Bilingual First Language Acquisition
(BFLA) is used in the present study to refer to a child’s regular exposure to two languages
after birth and during the first years of life (cf. De Houver 1990, 1995; Lanza, 1997; Deuchar
& Quay, 2000).
We shall report on the data of simultaneous acquisition of Polish and European Portuguese by
a Polish-Portuguese child. The report is based on longitudinal data samples of the girl’s
spontaneous language production in her first years, and especially in what we propose to be
approached as her three-staged developmental sequence. Special attention is drawn to the
mixing patterns observed in noun and verb construction, in which part of the linguistic
information is brought from one input language and another part from the other.
Specific implications for bilingual acquisition include the questions of (i) whether originally a
bilingual child had one or two linguistic systems, (ii) what criteria should be used in
identifying one versus two systems, (iii) what the most important determinants of language
choice are for the developing bilingual, and – specifically – (iv) if there is a specific mixed
period phase in BFLA acquisition.
Some theoretical implications are hypothesized on the basis of our corpus, taking into
consideration different sort of linguistic information realised in each one of the two
languages, especially the production of morphosyntactic constructions preferably in one of the
tongues and filling the established grammatical schema with lexical information from the
other.
References
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