| Chapter 2: | Research on Bilingual First Language Acquisition |
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language is chosen (De Houwer, 1995, p. 229). Döpke reported that in German families in Australia, young parents anticipate that raising children bilingually “is doomed to failure.” As a result of this attitude, young parents “give up speaking German to their children if success is not immediate” (Döpke, 1988, p. 102). Therefore these children are not brought up bilingually.
Lanza argued that “knowledge of when it is appropriate to keep both languages separate and when it is appropriate to mix languages, [is] all dependent on the context of language use and the child’s language socialization” (1997, p. 69). Studies systematically investigating the bilingual child’s use of context to differentiate between his or her languages are rare. The context of the child’s language use and language acquisition is another neglected area in the study of mixing in child bilingualism, according to Lanza (1997). Vihman’s (1985) work revealed the importance of the context of setting (home vs. outside the home) in her son’s differentiation between his two languages. In this case, context was treated as a given background variable.
The second approach in the examination of the importance of context on bilingual children’s acquisition is the relationship between the context of language use and the child’s language mixing. Here the context is defined as both the context of community and family patterns of language use and the context of conversation (Lanza, 1997, p. 10). The burning question in first language bilingual acquisition research has been whether the young bilingual child initially processes the languages using one system or two—the unitary language system hypothesis versus the separate development hypothesis. Language mixing has received different interpretations in these arguments. Those espousing the unitary language system hypothesis take mixing as evidence of the child’s inability to differentiate between his or her two languages. The separate development hypothesis, in contrast, contends that the bilingual child is able to differentiate the two languages from an early stage. Language mixing, for some researchers, stems from the mixing in the child’s environment; many other explanations for language mixing have been suggested, as well. More recent work has provided important empirical evidence that