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

In the case of person identification, however, the correspondence breaks down: The personal pronouns are differentiated according to who is saying them. In the simplest case, both the child and the parent can call the child James, but they cannot both correctly call him you. In other words, the invariance between speaker and listener breaks down. Understanding notions of speech roles is essential for acquiring personal pronouns.

Personal pronouns are a form of deixis (Wales, 1986, p. 401). Deictic terms serve to direct the hearer’s attention to spatial or temporal aspects of the situation of utterance that are often critical for appropriate interpretation. They do this in a particularly interesting way, for they serve as a meeting point for syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of language. This is because they are, to use G. Stern’s (1964) term, contingent expressions, whose interpretations are dependent not only on context-independent semantic information but also on information that is contingent on an actual (or construed) context. Deictic terms are used to direct the attention of the hearer of a communication towards some object or event. The aspect of the situation or speech event that is critical in this regard is typically information about the speaker, but in any case this information must enable decisions about person or place in relation to the utterance. Deictic expressions introduce an explicitly subjective orientation into linguistic classification. They draw attention to the fact that language is acquired and used by people in real situations.

The acquisition of the pronominal system has been studied in monolingual first language (L1) acquisition research in English and other European languages (Charney, 1980; Chiat, 1982; E. Clark, 1978; Deutsch, Wagner, Burchardt, Schulz, & Nakath, 2001; Huxley, 1970; Rispoli, 1994; Stern & Stern, 1900–1918). Moreover, the development of pronouns in first language acquisition has been studied mainly with reference to monolingual children rather than bilingual first language acquirers. However, limited aspects of pronominal development have been described in a handful of bilingual first language acquisition studies (De Houwer 1990; Lanza 1997; Meisel, 1990, 1994). These studies, which mainly involve European languages, discuss the emergence of pronominal forms and their relationship to the child’s morphosyntactic development, the frequency