This is the first Japanese-English Bilingual First Language Acquisition (BFLA) longitudinal study carried out within the framework of Processability Theory (PT) (Pienemann, 1998a). The informant of this study is Hannah, who was raised in Australia in a one-parent one-language environment from birth. Hannah’s speech production in each language was collected in a language-specific setting with different interlocutors (i.e., Japanese with the Japanese-speaking mother and English with the English-speaking father), from the time she was 1; 11 (one year and eleven months) until she was 4;10. This study investigates Hannah’s lexical development, the acquisition of morphology and syntax in the two languages. Unlike previous studies in bilingual children’s lexicon (Deuchar and Quay, 2000), this study focuses on the composition of the lexicon in each language to test for language-specific developmental patterns (Gentner and Boroditsky, 2001).The study also compares the development of these two languages in terms of MLU, lexical, morphological and syntactic development. Furthermore, the study examines the relationships between lexical and grammatical development within each of the two languages and tests the Critical Mass Hypothesis (Marchman and Bates, 1994) in a bilingual context. One of the central issues in the field of BFLA, identified by scholars such as DeHouwer (2005) and Meisel (1990a), is to characterise the relationship between the two developing languages of one child. Does a bilingual child initially develop the two languages as one linguistic system that later separates into two as expounded by Volterra and Taeschner (1978), or does a bilingual child develop the two languages separately from the beginning, as represented by De Houwer’s (1990) Separate Development Hypothesis (SDH)? Previous BFLA studies addressing this issue (e.g., De Houwer, 1990; Meisel, 1990a; Mishina, 1997; Paradis and Genesee, 1996) did not have a common point of reference to compare the development of two different languages directly. In the present study, PT provides a common point of reference for a direct comparison of the development of two typologically distant languages. Results indicate that both Japanese and English of the child developed in the sequence predicted by PT. They also support the SDH for lexical development, the acquisition of morphology and word order. The study confirms the Critical Mass Hypothesis in bilingual context. The results from the present study suggest that, for one bilingual child, Japanese and English each developed in parallel but in a separate manner. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/189453 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Itani-Adams, Yuki, University of Western Sydney, College of Arts, School of Humanities and Languages |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
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