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

Chapter 2

Research on Bilingual First Language Acquisition

2.1. Introduction

The study of bilingual acquisition has a remarkably long history. Ronjat reported the first scientific study of a bilingual child in 1913. Later, Werner Leopold published the classic study of his two bilingual daughters in four volumes between 1939 and 1949. This research represents an early start for the study of the simultaneous acquisition of two languages, but despite Ronjat’s and Leopold’s work, further research remained sparse until the 1980s. There has been a great surge of research activity in the field since the mid-1980s, and it continues unabated. For overviews of the work on bilingual children done primarily prior to 1980, see Lindholm (1980), McLaughlin (1984), and Redlinger (1979). This chapter reviews certain underinvestigated issues in the field of bilingual first language acquisition and provides a brief account of the most hotly debated issue in this area: one system versus two systems—the unitary language system