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Perhaps an area of concern to the children acquiring two first languages is person identification and pronoun development. Person identification and pronoun development is an important milestone in a child’s cognitive, interpersonal, and language development. In linguistic development, children are faced with new facets of person as a fundamental category of social life. Understanding the child’s establishment of an individuated identity conceptually and linguistically is particularly important in bilingual children, for they must do this simultaneously in two languages and two cultures. Such understanding is becoming even more crucial in today’s global environment, where more and more people build an identity that transcends linguistic and national boundaries. How does the experience of having two languages affect the idea of person identification and the development of pronouns? People bear different types of names, but people can also be referred to with indexicals dependent on the social structure underlying language use. The problem of the acquisition of personal pronouns lies in its deictic nature. Learning the semantic rules for first- and second-person pronouns poses problems for young children because they need to have the basic person category cognitively available, because the referents of pronouns shift with speech roles, and because a model for correct use of these pronouns is not provided in speech addressed to the child. Only a handful of previous works have discussed aspects of bilingual children’s acquisition of personal pronouns. As an in-depth longitudinal study of a bilingual child’s development, this book attempts to fill that gap.
This book presents a longitudinal study tracing, for the first time, the developmental route from nominal to pronominal reference to person in a bilingual first language acquirer of two typologically distinct languages: Mandarin and English. It examines the development of the noun-phrase (NP) system in one child’s early word learning and the emergence of person identification and personal pronouns in his production of both languages. The form-function relations obtaining in the child’s development of self-referential expressions leading to his acquisition of personal pronouns are described in the context of the child’s general syntactic development, from age 1;7 to age 4;0, and is