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.

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.

What is language and how can we investigate its acquisition by children or adults? What perspectives exist from which to view acquisition? What internal constraints and external factors shape acquisition? What are the properties of interlanguage systems? This comprehensive 31-chapter handbook is an authoritative survey of second language acquisition (SLA). Its multi-perspective synopsis on recent developments in SLA research provides significant contributions by established experts and widely recognized younger talent. It covers cutting edge and emerging areas of enquiry not treated elsewhere in a single handbook, including third language acquisition, electronic communication, incomplete first language acquisition, alphabetic literacy and SLA, affect and the brain, discourse and identity. Written to be accessible to newcomers as well as experienced scholars of SLA, the Handbook is organised into six thematic sections, each with an editor-written introduction.