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English in Australia. As the literature shows, bilingualism will be a great cognitive and economic asset to Australians (and to British, Americans, and Canadians) of Chinese descent, as well as a social asset for them and their families.
Firmly grounded in bilingual language acquisition theory and employing exemplary methodology, this book uses empirical data to assess the relation between the two languages of a bilingual child growing up in Sydney. There are three lynchpins of this study mapping the development of a young bilingual: person identification, personal pronoun acquisition and usage, and the well-known issue of whether the early lexical and syntactic development is “separate” or “merged” in the early stages of development. All these issues are studied carefully and patiently through data collected from a child between the ages of 1 year and 7 months and 4 years. Findings are compared with those from monolingual children, where those are available. The study goes beyond bilingual language acquisition issues and contributes to the general field of child language and, especially, to that of bilingual child research.
In addition to its academic value, this study can and will have practical significance. It is important for parents to be shown optimal ways of achieving bilingual language development in their children so that they can use their language competence for the good of their nations, as well as for the benefit of their own families. It is therefore important to have an exemplary study of Mandarin-English bilingual language acquisition.
––Michael Clyne,
Professorial Fellow, School of Languages, University of Melbourne,
and Emeritus Professor, Monash University