This thesis presents the results of an experimental study designed to examine whether children raised bilingually in Japanese and English from birth in Christchurch, New Zealand, exhibit the same morphological case and topic marking knowledge in Japanese as monolingual children in Japan. The participants were 34 children aged between five and eleven years who have been raised in a one-person one-language environment in an English dominant community. The study replicated previous studies on monolingual Japanese children, and involved two widely used paradigms for assessing a child’s grammar: picture selection, and elicited imitation. The responses of the children in this study were different from those reported in studies of monolingual children. In the picture selection tasks, some children in this study interpreted the agent-patient relationship based on the word order cue in the object-initial types of transitive sentences, whereas previous studies have demonstrated that monolingual children five years and older are able to interpret the agent-patient relationship in the same way as adults, using the case marking cue. Moreover, in the elicited imitation tasks, many children in this study re-analysed the topic-comment construction as a genitive possessive when the particles in the stimuli were masked with noise. This pattern has not been reported in any previous study. The results also revealed that there was a great degree of individual variation. The study suggests cross-linguistic influence from English on Japanese as a possible explanation for the difference between the children in this study and monolinguals. The phenomena observed in the results satisfies two conditions for cross-linguistic influence proposed by Hulk and Müller (2000) and Müller and Hulk (2001), because (i) English and Japanese overlap at the surface level in terms of the agent position in a canonical sentence and the possessive structure, and (ii) the problematic structures for some children in this study involved the interface between syntax and pragmatics in the C-domain. The study, however, has no principled explanation for the individual variation found because of a lack of data on the Japanese input and the child’s fluency, both of which are likely to affect simultaneous bilingual development.

Given the perception that it lacks differentiated study for distinct linguistic varieties under the general discussion of mother tongue tuition, this study is devoted to the Chinese mother tongue education in Sweden. It aims to better understand the motivational issues in the Chinese mother tongue learning for Swedish-Chinese simultaneous bilinguals from the teachers’ perspective. Interview was chosen as the primary fieldwork method to solicit teachers’ understanding and experience on the subject. It is found out that the teachers experience motivation of target students as a multifaceted issue and their strategies stretch over a wide spectrum. The collected empirics are analyzed with the help of linguistic theories of the Chinese language and bilingualism, as well as motivational theories in language learning. It is concluded that the family plays a vital role in the development of bilingualism and that the multiplicity and the morphographic nature of the Chinese language impose extra challenge on Chinese mother tongue teachers and Swedish-Chinese simultaneous bilinguals, at the same time the current general curriculum for mother tongue teaching fails to provide sufficient and relevant guidance to Chinese mother tongue teaching.

“Family language policy” (FLP) is the accepted term for the field of study of the explicit planning and practices concerning language within a family unit in a home. Previous research has shown that FLP aids in the bilingual acquisition of a child (DeCapua & Wintergerst 2009; Kayam & Hirsch 2014; King, Fogle, & Logan‐Terry 2008; Li 1999; Oh; Schwartz 2008). However, there has been little research providing answers to whether FLP has a direct influence on language maintenance in adulthood, especially whether they acquire and maintain a native or native-like accent in both languages. The purpose of this study is to determine if any and to what degree FLP influences the bilingual accent acquisition of Spanish/English heritage speakers in the United States. This is a qualitative case study performed through sociolinguistic interviews of three families containing now adult simultaneous bilinguals who learned Spanish and English throughout childhood. After obtaining information of each family’s FLP, each participant (n = 9) was asked to provide a speech sample in both English and Spanish (the heritage language). These samples were then rated by native speakers of English and Spanish respectively. Results suggest that the level of perceived foreign accent of the heritage language may be influenced by certain factors included in an individual FLP, as well as the speaker’s language confidence and individual differences including language aptitude.

This study concerns simultaneous bilingual acquisition (2L1) of Swedish-Brazilian children growing up in mixed-lingual families in Stockholm, with Swedish as their dominant language. Earlier studies on this language combination were not found. Not even were there any studies considering 2L1 children of the same age group as our main subjects (Anna 7;7,3–9;1,30, Maria 6;1,16–6;11,11). An analysis of their acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) as a weaker language (WL) was carried out in a Generative Grammar approach, mainly through the selective theory of language acquisition. The corpus consists of interviews with 2L1 children in a semi-longitudinal registration of their production. The focus of this analysis lies on the observation of three domains of BP grammar that differ morpho-syntactically from Swedish: verb inflection; VP as minimal responses; NP number and gender agreement. Three main research questions were formulated: 1) Are the simple and robust structures, provided by domestic input enough for triggering the functional categories (FC) of their WL? 2) If the FCs are activated, do they develop in the same sequence as a WL as they would in BPL1? 3) If the 2L1 children show any deviations in acquiring the grammar of their WL, is it possible to distinguish any influence from Swedish? To answer these questions a contrastive study was carried out, comparing the acquisition of BPWL with studies on 2L1 and BPL1 acquisition. The results show that the domestic input is enough for triggering the grammar of the WL, and that it was triggered and developed through a similar procedure to that of BPL1, although delayed. Contact with BPL1 input in Brazil was necessary to activate the children’s oral production. When using VPs for minimal responses it requires more than domestic input, and the influence of Swedish was reflected in the subjects’ use of sim ‘yes’ instead of VPs, as in this case grammar enters the domain of discourse at the syntax/pragmatics interface.

This study investigates the impact of second language age of onset on the development of syntactic competence in bilinguals. Forty-five bilingual children were tested using a picture- matching task with relative clauses. In this paradigm, children are aurally presented with relative clauses of various kinds and are asked to match what they hear with the appropriate picture (out of four choices) on the screen. More specifically, our experiment compared the comprehension of subject- vs. object-extracted center-embedded relative clauses and contained sentences with noun phrases (NPs) that did or did not match in number (both NPs singular or plural = match, one NP singular, one NP plural = mismatch). We compared the performance of a group of Simultaneous bilinguals (two languages since birth), Early sequential bilinguals (first exposure to L2 - English between the ages of 1 to 4) and Late sequential bilinguals (first exposure to L2 -English after the age of 4 but latest at the age of 6 - primary school). The mean age of the participants at the time of testing was approx. 10 years of age. The results show that there is a varied pattern in the comprehension strategies used among the three bilingual groups. The group of Simultaneous bilinguals showed more reliance on the syntactic information contained in...