Date:  14.10.2004

Time:  19:15

Jürgen Meisel (Hamburg):
Early differentiation of grammatical systems and subsequent
developments in simultaneous acquisition of bilingualism

Additional information:
Abstract:
The simultaneous acquisition of two or more languages since birth has long been suspected to represent a hazardous situation for children. The main concern has been that language develop¬ment may be delayed significantly and that these children might at least temporarily not be able to separate the languages they are acquiring, and perhaps even fail to fully develop either of the languages they are exposed to (‘semi-lingualism’). More recently, linguistic and psycholinguistic research has demonstrated, however, that neither concern is warranted. Children acquiring two or more languages simultaneously differentiate the grammatical systems from early on and they acquire their languages at a developmental rate which falls clearly within the range of what is considered to be normal for monolinguals. In this presentation, I will argue that the human lan¬guage making capacity is an endowment for multilingualism, enabling children to acquire the same kind of grammatical knowledge in each of their languages like the respective monolingu¬¬¬¬als. In order to support this claim, I will summarize research findings demonstrating that gram¬matical systems are indeed differentiated from early on, i.e. as soon as children can be shown to make use of grammatical principles in organizing their speech. I will support this claim by sum¬marizing various types of arguments indicating how bilinguals differentiate syntactic and mor¬phological knowledge at early points of development, referring to examples from Romance lan¬guages (French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese) in contact with non-Romance languages (Ger¬man, Basque, English). Finally, I will argue that, once grammatical systems have been differen¬tiated, subsequent development does not differ qualitatively from the development of the same knowledge systems in bilinguals.