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

the young bilingual child forms two linguistic systems without going through a stage of lexical or syntactic mixing. Stages of lexical and syntactic mixing, then, are apparently not necessary correlates of early bilingualism, as Volterra and Taeschner (1978) contended. Studies by Volterra and Taeschner (1978), Taeschner (1983), Redlinger and Park (1980), and Swain and Wesche (1975) support the unitary language system hypothesis. One criticism of the unitary claim these researchers have made about early bilingual development is that some of these studies do not examine their data in context. Children’s mixing cannot be investigated without a presentation of language mixing within a context (e.g., De Houwer, 1990; Genesee, 1989; Lanza, 1997).

Lanza (2000, p. 234) contended that in order to discern different sources for language contact, linguists will need to explore more carefully the use of context in the child’s speech and how this may affect the child’s processing and use of the two languages. Here the context of language use is not simply the particular language used with the child. Lanza (2000, p. 235) further explained that the sociolinguistic variable of context will trigger the psycholinguistic variable of language mode, “the stage of activation of the bilingual’s languages and language processing mechanisms at a given point in time” (Grosjean, 1998). Hence activation of one language or both will influence cognitive processing. A bilingual or a multilingual individual will find himself or herself somewhere on a continuum between a monolingual and bilingual mode (cf. Grosjean, 1998). This fact underscores the need to carefully examine the context of language development and use, that is, the extent to which an interaction is monolingual or bilingual in nature, even when doing a grammatical analysis (Lanza, 1998). Context is dynamic; language functions in context and as context (cf. Lanza, 2000). In examining Siri’s interactions from a discourse analytic perspective, Lanza (1997) operationalised this monolingual–bilingual continuum through the use of various discourse strategies employed by the parent to open negotiations for a monolingual or a bilingual continuum. She noted that Siri’s mother negotiated a more monolingual context with her daughter than did the child’s father. For example, her mother would often respond to