The Bilingual Acquisition of English and Mandarin: Chinese Childr ...

acquisition. Theories of bilingual first language acquisition have tended to rely upon the study of parent-child dyads. In fact, most children all over the world grow up in polyadic situations. Most children spend a great amount of time with parents, grandparents, and siblings or peers; with older children or others acting as caregivers; and sitting around with a group of adults and other children. Researchers know less about the relative influence of utterances overheard rather than addressed to the child. Yuiko Oshima-Takane (1988) has proposed the following hypothesis: Children learn the meaning of the personal pronouns by attending to the conversations of other people. She further suggested that overheard speech might be essential, particularly for the acquisition of the second-person pronoun. If this proposal is correct, then children’s success at learning the personal pronouns must be gained in part by attending to, and understanding, people who are talking to each other. As Zhu and Li have pointed out,

Deutsch, Wagner, Burchardt, Schulz, and Nakath’s (2001, p. 310) person-naming study of 47 monolingual German children between the ages of 2 and 3 years under controlled conditions demonstrates that a child with older siblings is not only faster than an only child to replace nominals in favour of (adult-like) pronominals but also less prone to make semantic errors by reversing pronouns. Deutsch et al. have identified the facilitating role of the sibling effect in experiencing confrontational input and in accessing dialogues in which personal deixis is used in a mature fashion. This sibling effect hypothesis indicates that in language development, children use multifaceted linguistic “offerings,” not just those stemming from the parents. Nevertheless, researchers know little about how