Initial Production of Inflections in Bilingual Children

Abstract

In most research on early bilingual development it is reported that children for a certain period mix elements from both languages in their utterances. How should that mixing be interpreted? Is it related to the quality of the parental input, or because the child is unable to separate two linguistic systems in early development, or what explanation should be given? The interpretations of mixed utterances fall into two main theoretical approaches to bilingual development. These two approaches are called the two-system model and the one-system model. It is assumed in the two-system model that the child is able to separate the two different linguistic systems in her environment from early on and that the development of each language follows the same pattern as observed in monolingual children (Bergman, 1976; Genesee, 1989; Lindholm 1980; Lindholm and Padilla, 1978; Meisel, 1989; Pye, 1986). On the other hand, it is assumed in the one-system model that there are certain cognitive prerequisites for language differentiation both on the lexical level and the syntactic level (Leopold, 1939–49; Taeschner, 1983; Vihman, 1985; Volterra and Taeschner, 1978). The one-system model is made especially explicit by Volterra and Taeschner (1978) and Taeschner (1983). According to Volterra and Taeschner language differentiation takes place in three stages: