| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Most studies in bilingual first language acquisition have examined bilinguals brought up in families that follow a one parent/person, one language principle, and most of the investigations involve only Indo-European languages. In this study, the two typologically distant languages Mandarin and English provide new data for exploring the validity of the separate development hypothesis and the extent of language interaction. In addition, the different sociolinguistic language-exposure setting tests the application and generalisation of the separate development hypothesis to family situations other than the one parent/person, one language model of language input (a modified version of type 3 as defined in Romaine, 1995; details are discussed in chapter 2). Moreover, the type of bilingual child in the present study represents the most common case in immigrant families, in which context-bound language input and use in a one language, one environment setting are the norm. In this case study, Mandarin is the home (and ethnic-community) language spoken by both parents and other family members, who are native speakers, and English is the dominant language of all other environments. Even in the home environment, the child is exposed to English every day at certain set times, such as English storytelling time, English television-watching time, and peer playtime. This type of bilingual case study offers an opportunity to investigate the possibility of language influence and interaction—for instance, language interference, language acceleration and delay, and differences in the areas of early word learning, syntax, and pronouns. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 explore these issues.
1.5. The Development of Personal Pronouns in a Bilingual Context
How does a child identify persons and develop personal pronouns in two languages? The problem of the acquisition of deictic terms is fascinating for a number of reasons. First, deictic terms provide the ground for the breakdown in the immediate “intersubjectivity” between the adult and child. For nouns, a cat for you is also a cat for me. Words imply the same world and the same linguistic conventions for representing that entity.