| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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of use of certain pronominals in each of two language environments, or cross-linguistic influence in mixed utterances.
The longitudinal study of the transition from nominal person reference to pronominal person reference in early linguistic development has, however, seldom been reported in the literature. Bilingual L1 pronominal development studies on this issue are also scarce. This study is the first attempt to trace the developmental route from nominal to pronominal person reference of a Mandarin-English bilingual first language learner (age 1;7–4;0). Chapter 4 is devoted to this issue.
English pronominal development has been studied in monolingual children (Brown, 1973; Budwig, 1990; Charney, 1980; Chiat, 1986; E. Clark, 1978; Huxley, 1970, and others); Erbaugh (1992), Y. Li (1995) and others have discussed Mandarin monolingual development. The present study aims to describe the development of self-referential expressions and the acquisition of personal pronouns in a Mandarin-English bilingual child in both languages and to compare this to monolingual development. Both referential and syntactic aspects of nominal and pronominal development are addressed, including form-function differentiation of persons and numbers in both languages and the emergence of grammatical differentiation of case marking in English. Chapter 6 provides a detailed, systematic analysis of this issue.
In order to approach issues mentioned at the very beginning of this chapter—namely, what bilingual children can teach researchers about their acquisition process and acquisition strategies in on-line communication (and thus also about those of monolingual children)—researchers need detailed descriptive analyses of bilingual children’s speech production. Unfortunately, as this study attempts to show in chapter 2, because of certain factors in bilingual acquisition—for instance, implicit overhead input and peer input, context-bound bilingual input in a one language, one environment immigrant-family setting—knowledge about the nature of the unbalanced bilingual child’s two languages (particularly the developmental pathway of his or her weaker language) and knowledge about acquisition strategies in the field of bilingual first language acquisition today are quite limited. New combinations of languages and different