Bilingual and Multilingual Acquisition of Chinese

Abstract

This chapter examines children's acquisition of Chinese alongside one or more additional languages in early childhood. One theme involves how properties of Chinese interact with other languages in the course of development: What aspects of Chinese are vulnerable to influence from other languages? In what ways does Chinese affect the other language(s) being acquired by the child? A second theme is how Chinese languages can contribute to the understanding of bilingual and multilingual development. The chapter makes a suggestion that studying the acquisition of Chinese offers fresh insights into language acquisition in bilingual and multilingual contexts. In the course of bilingual development, some prominent grammatical properties of Chinese have been found to undergo transfer. One property of Chinese that is readily transferred to English is wh in situ: in wh-questions, the wh-phrase remains “in situ” where the corresponding constituent would occur in a declarative sentence.