"This book is a must read for students of bilingual first language acquisition. In this groundbreaking work, Ruying Qi traces the development of two of the world's most important languages, Mandarin Chinese and English, in a young child of immigrant parents growing up in Australia. Dr. Qi's work is trendsetting in its focus on pragmatic and semantic aspects of the bilingual development process, which have been understudied phenomena so far. Bilingualism and child language scholars alike will appreciate the many bridges made between issues specific to the bilingual situation and theoretical issues relevant to the study of child language in general." - Professor Annick De Houwer, University of Erfurt, and Director, European Research Network for Bilingual Studies ERBIS Germany

Increasingly, children grow up hearing two languages from birth. This comprehensive textbook explains how children learn to understand and speak those languages. It brings together both established knowledge and the latest findings about different areas of bilingual language development. It also includes new analyses of previously published materials. The book describes how bilingually raised children learn to understand and use sounds, words and sentences in two languages. A recurrent theme is the large degree of variation between bilingual children. This variation in how children develop bilingually reflects the variation in their language learning environments. Positive attitudes from the people in bilingual children's language learning environments and their recognition that child bilingualism is not monolingualism-times-two are the main ingredients ensuring that children grow up to be happy and expert speakers of two languages.

This book contains reports of research on bilingualism in infants and children as well as perspectives from those involved in cross-linguistic research on language development, literacy development in bilingual children, and psycholinguistic research on bilingualism in adults. It offers a fresh multidisciplinary perspective and next steps for research on childhood bilingualism.

This book discusses multiple aspects of Chinese dual language immersion (DLI) programs, with a focus on the controversial Utah model. The first part of the book focuses on the parents, teachers, and school administrators. It looks at the perceptions of the three groups toward the Utah model, how they build a supportive DLI classroom with an emphasis on teacher–teacher and teacher–parent communication, and how the teachers position themselves in teaching through their teacher identities. The second part of the book emphasizes classroom research and explores teaching and learning strategies, corrective feedback and learner uptake and repair, translanguaging in authentic teacher–student interaction, and Chinese-character teaching. As the first DLI book to include a non-alphabetical language, Chinese, it addresses the need for more research on DLI programs of languages other than Spanish. The book will benefit not only Chinese DLI educators and administrators in the US, but will also offer some useful suggestions and thoughts to educators and administrators of similar programs worldwide.

An authoritative overview of research into heritage language acquisition, covering key terminological and empirical issues, theoretical approaches, and research methodologies.

Explaining the acquisition and processing of relative clauses has long challenged psycholinguistics researchers. The current volume presents a collection of chapters that consider the acquisition of relative clauses with a particular focus on function, typology, and language processing. A diverse range of theoretical approaches and languages are bought to bear on the acquisition of this construction type, making the volume unique in its coverage. The volume will appeal to students and scholars whose interest lies in the acquisition and processing of syntax with a particular focus on complex sentences in crosslinguistic and functionalist perspective.

How do children develop bilingual competence? Do bilingual children develop language in the same way as monolinguals? Set in the context of findings on language development, this book examines the acquisition of English and Spanish by two brothers in the first six years of their lives. Based on in-depth and meticulous analyses of naturalistic data, it explores how the systems of both languages affect each other as the children develop, and how different levels of exposure to each language influence the nature of acquisition. The author demonstrates that the children's grammars and lexicons follow a developmental path similar to that of monolinguals, but that cross-linguistic interactions affecting lexical, semantic and discourse-pragmatic aspects arise in Spanish when exposure to it diminishes around the age of four. The first of its kind, this original study is a must-read for students and researchers in bilingualism, child development, language acquisition and language contact.