| Chapter 2: | Research on Bilingual First Language Acquisition |
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the final product of that process, that is, in the type of bilingual speaker it produces. However, there are not yet enough empirical studies about the relationship among the six types of bilingual children’s input conditions and their mental representations of the languages and their patterns of language use.
Most studies in early simultaneous bilingual development deal with type 1 (see De Houwer, 1995, 2005, for reviews). George Saunders’s successful case study of raising his three children (two boys, Frank and Thomas, and a girl, Katrina) bilingually in English and German (1982, 1988) fits into Romaine’s type 5. Vihman’s case study of her son Raivo’s input of Estonian and English (1985) and Deuchar and Quay’s (2000) case study of the input situation of their young bilingual informant, M, who was acquiring Spanish and English from birth, can be said to be a modified version of type 2.
Romaine’s type 6 is perhaps a more common category than it might seem to be on the basis of its representation in the literature (Zhu & Li, 2005). As De Houwer (1995) noticed, many of the world’s bilingual children grow up in “native bilingual communities” in which monolingual norms may be unavailable or nonexistent (Wölck, 1987, p. 8). However, the effect of the virtually complete lack of separation of the two input languages here on the development process has not been systematically studied. Along the continuum between type 1 and type 6, a variety of combinations of input types, degree of separation, and mixture of language uses obtain in reality. For example, combinations of type 3 and 6 are most commonly found among immigrant families in a host country such as Australia:
Parents: The parents are bilinguals who share the same native languages.
Community: The dominant language is different from the parents’ languages.
Strategy: The parents speak their native languages to the child at home most of the time, and the child is exposed to the dominant language most of the time when outside the home.