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

study of language acquisition in general and for bilingual first language acquisition in particular are explored, as well.

This introductory chapter presents an overview of the major issues.

1.2. The Bilingual Context and Its Significance

Children’s bilingual acquisition has received increasing attention in theoretical and empirical explorations since the late 1980s (e.g., De Houwer, 1990, 2009; Deuchar & Quay, 2000; Genesee, 1989; Lanza, 1997; Meisel, 1986, 2007; Paradis, Nicoladis, & Genesee, 2000; Yip & Matthews, 2007). Several factors have contributed to this surge. First, in the age of globalisation, at least as many children grow up bilingual and multilingual as monolingual; that is, bilingual and multilingual children are the majority rather than a minority (W. Li, 2010; Tucker, 1998). Therefore the study of bilingual children’s language acquisition is worth pursuing in its own right. Second, theories of language acquisition must ultimately incorporate the facts of bilingual acquisition. Third, there are implications for the conceptualisation of mind and brain linked to bilingualism and bilingual acquisition that researchers have only begun to explore—for instance, the human language faculty and the human mind. Bilingual experience across the lifespan seems to develop better brains—in terms of both better executive systems available to compensate for failing ability in other parts of the brain and possibly better brain structures through the use of those systems (see Australian ABC Radio National, 2011; Bialystok, 2001; Li, Tan, Bates, & Tzeng, 2006). Moreover, there is an increasing appreciation among language acquisition researchers of the need to turn to cross-linguistic studies and to compare these data to studies of monolingual children acquiring different languages (Slobin, 1985a). Such cross-linguistic research has, among other things, been motivated by the question of the relative importance of language-universal and language-specific factors in acquisition (see e.g., Berman, 1986; Slobin, 1985b). A child growing up with two languages from birth provides a unique opportunity to investigate general theoretical issues in language acquisition because in the case of