| Chapter 2: | Research on Bilingual First Language Acquisition |
|
|
Quay, 2000, p. 9). When the parents in this study made a decision about the languages they would use with the bilingual-to-be child James, they used what Deuchar and Clark (1988, p. 461) called “sociolinguistic authentic” input; they did not adopt the one parent/person, one language principle, which would have been unnatural in this family. The language-exposure pattern for establishing James’s early Mandarin-English bilingualism is context-bound language, in particular, the combination of environment/situation-bound and interactional context-bound language. The environment-bound variable is what Vihman and McLaughlin (1982) called “an environment-bound language, with one language [Mandarin] at home and another [English] in the community” (p. x).This is similar to De Houwer’s situation-bound language, in which setting determines the parents’ language choice when speaking to the child. As for the interactional context-bound variable, topic is the main determinant of parents’ language choice when speaking to the child at home (e.g., half-hour storytelling time in English at bedtime). Context-bound communication also involves code switching in the parents’ and the child’s conversation during topic changes as well as between parents’ dyads. The child James’s bilingual input situation in this study represents the usual bilingual conditions for the second generation of an immigrant family in which both parents speak their native language, which is an ethnic-community language in the host country (as Mandarin is in Australia). But how does input affect bilingual acquisition?
2.3. The Role of Input in Acquisition
De Houwer (1990, 1995, 2005) stressed the importance of bilingual children’s input; young children pay very close attention to the variable nature of the input. Without at least this, it would appear impossible for young bilingual children to produce utterances that are clearly relatable to each of their input languages. Lanza (1997, p. 70) pointed out that the impact of the bilingual child’s linguistic input has been neglected in studies of language mixing in infant bilingualism. Studies of bilingual children can “contribute to the debate within monolingual acquisition