How does a child become bilingual? The answer to this intriguing question remains largely a mystery, not least because it has been far less extensively researched than the process of mastering a first language. Drawing on new studies of children exposed to two languages from birth (English and Cantonese), this book demonstrates how childhood bilingualism develops naturally in response to the two languages in the children's environment. While each bilingual child's profile is unique, the children studied are shown to develop quite differently from monolingual children. The authors demonstrate significant interactions between the children's developing grammars, as well as the important role played by language dominance in their bilingual development. Based on original research and using findings from the largest available multimedia bilingual corpus, the book will be welcomed by students and scholars working in child language acquisition, bilingualism and language contact.

Synthesizing the theory behind and methodology for conducting judgment tests, Using Judgments in Second Language Acquisition Research aims to clarify the issues surrounding this method and to provide best practices in its use. The text is grounded on a balanced and comprehensive background of the usage of judgment data in the past up through its present-day applications. SLA researchers and graduate students will find useful a chapter serving as a "how-to" guide for a variety of situations to conduct research using judgments, including ways to optimize task design and examples from successful studies. Lucid and practical, Using Judgments in Second Language Acquisition Research offers guidance on a method widely used by SLA researchers, both old and new to the field.

This book presents a thorough description of morphosyntactic knowledge developed by learners of French in four different learning situations first language (L1) acquisition, second (L2) language acquisition, bilingualism, and acquisition by children with Specific Language Impairment within the theoretical framework of generative grammar. This approach allows for multiple comparisons across acquisition contexts, which provides the reader with invaluable insights into the nature of the acquisition process. The book is divided into four parts each dealing with a major morphosyntactic domain of acquisition: the verbal domain, the pronominal domain, the nominal domain, and the CP domain. Each part contains four chapters, the first one presenting an overview of the basic facts and analyses of the relevant properties of French, and the next three focusing on the different acquisition contexts. This book will be useful to anyone interested in the acquisition of French and in language development in general. It is also meant to stimulate cross-linguistic research from a theoretical perspective."

The collected essays in this volume present an overview and state-of-the-field of traditional and recently developed methodological approaches to the study of bilingual reading comprehension. It critically reviews and examines major findings from classical behavioral approaches such as the visual moving window, rapid-serial visual presentation (RSVP), and eye-tracking, as well as newly developing neuropsycholinguistic methodologies such as Event-Related Potentials (ERPS), and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Written to address a timely topic, Methods in Bilingual Reading Comprehension Research updates the field of bilingual reading by critically examining the contributions of the various behavioral and technologically-based reading techniques used to understand psychological processes underlying written language comprehension. Each topic is covered first from a theoretical, and then from an experimental, viewpoint. Moreover, the volume contributes to the development and establishment of Bilingual Reading as a subfield of bilingual sentence processing and fills a significant gap in the literature on bilingual language processing and thought. Significantly, Methods in Bilingual Reading Comprehension Research presents an overall view of some of the typical psycholinguistic techniques and approaches, as well as proposing other possible tasks that may prove viable in investigating such theoretical issues as bilingual lexical ambiguity resolution, or how bilingual speakers might resolve multiple sources of potentially conflicting information as they comprehend sentences and discourse during the communicative process. In addition, to aid reader comprehension and encourage readers to acquire “hands on” experience in the creation and development of experiments in the realm of bilingual reading research, each chapter includes a list of key words, suggested student research projects, and questions to both help the reader review the chapter and expand upon the reading. With its comprehensive coverage of a crucial subfield of psycholinguistics and language processing, Methods in Bilingual Reading Comprehension Research is an invaluable and informative resource for all students and researchers in bilingualism, neurolinguistics, bilingual cognition, and other related fields.