Traute Taeschner

The acquisition and development of language by bilingual children

Analysing the gradual learning process through which a child becomes bilingual from early infancy, three stages can be distinguished: (1) the child has one lexical system which includes words from both languages; (2) the child distinguishes two different lexicons but applies the same syntactic rules to both languages; (3) the child has two linguistic codes, differentiated both in lexicon and in syntax, but each language is exclusively associated with the person using that language. Only at the end of this stage, when the tendency to categorize people in terms of their language decreases, can one say that a child is truly bilingual.

Affixes and function words in the written language of deaf children

ABSTRACTThe goal of this article is to investigate whether the acquisition of some morpho-syntactic aspects inItalian deaf adolescents is simply delayed with respect to hearing children, or whether it followssignificantly different developmental patterns. Twenty-five deaf students (age range: 11-15 years)and a group of 125 hearing controls (age range: 6-16 years) performed four tests, administered inwritten form, relative to different grammatical aspects: plurals, articles, and clitic pronouns. Resultsshowed three different patterns of development depending on the grammatical aspect considered.Deaf children compared to hearing controls showed normal development in the pluralization task,delayed development in the pronoun task, and a qualitatively different pattern in the article task. INTRODUCTION There is now a large body of research demonstrating that congenitally deafchildren acquire a sign language following the same timing and acquisitionpatterns observed in hearing children acquiring spoken languages (Newport M Quigley & King, 1980; Swisher, 1976), prelingual deaf children can learnto speak, but usually do not attain native levels of competence in either the oralor the written form of a spoken language. The combined results of differentstudies point to the following general conclusions about English-speaking deafstudents as compared to hearing students:they produce shorter sentences and avoid complex syntactic structures;they display smaller productive and receptive vocabularies;they display a certain rigidity in the use of particular words;they make errors in the comprehension of written texts containing reversible pas-sives, pronouns, plural noun inflections, and prepositions;they have problems in judging the grammatical correctness of sentences withsubordination, relativization, or pronominalization; and© 198 Cambridg8 e University Press 0142-7164/88

La adquisición y el desarrollo del lenguaje en niños bilingües

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A cross-language study of prosodic modifications in mothers' and fathers' speech to preverbal infants *

ResumenSe analizo el proceso de aprendizaje gradual mediante el que un nino llega a ser bilingue desde la temprana infancia, distinguiendose tres estadios: (1) el nino tiene un unico sistema lexical que incluye palabras de ambas lenguas; (2) el nino distingue dos lexicos diferentes pero aplica las mismas reglas sintacticas a ambas lenguas; (3) el nino posee dos codigos linguisticos, diferenciados tanto en lexico como en sintaxis, pero cada lengua esta asociada exclusivamente con la persona que la usa. Solo al final de este estadio, cuando decrece la tendencia a categorizer a las personas en funcion de su lengua, puede decirse que el nino es verdaderamente bilingue.