Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preface

CHAPTER 1. Introducing Bilingual First Language Acquisition -- What is Bilingual First Language Acquisition (BFLA)? -- The family as the primary socialization unit for BFLA -- Is BFLA a common phenomenon? -- A brief history of the study of BFLA -- Summary box -- Suggestions for study activities -- Recommended reading

CHAPTER 2: Bilingual children’s language development: an overview -- Early interaction, socialization and the child’s own developmental path -- Language learning in the first year at the intersection of interaction, socialization and maturation -- An outline of bilingual development in the first five years of life -- Normal variation in BFLA and MFLA -- Bilingual children’s language repertoires -- Language choice -- The relation between BFLA children’s two developing languages -- Summary box -- Suggestions for study activities -- Recommended reading

CHAPTER 3. Research methods in BFLA -- Why this chapter is important even if you are not embarking on a study of BFLA -- Need for bilingual researchers -- Subject selection: making sure you are dealing with BFLA -- Deciding on how many subjects you should study -- When and where to collect data: need for sociolinguistic authenticity -- Data handling: transcription and coding -- CHILDES as an important tool in BFLA for corpus-based work -- Bilingual corpora available through CHILDES -- The CDI as an important tool for lexical research in BFLA -- Other recommendations specific to BFLA -- Need to clearly describe the BFLA learning context -- Summary box -- Suggestions for study activities -- Recommended reading

CHAPTER 4. Socializing environments and BLFA -- Preliminaries -- It all starts with love... and positive attitudes -- Attitudes and beliefs -- Bilingual children’s language learning environments -- What BFLA children hear -- Young BFLA children’s linguistic soundscapes -- Language models -- The role of language presentation -- Language orientation -- Input frequency in BFLA -- What BFLA children say -- Changes in BFLA children’s linguistic soundscapes and their effects -- Speaking the ‘right’ language and what it depends on -- Explaining the composition of young BFLA children’s linguistic repertoires -- Summary box -- Suggestions for study activities -- Recommended reading

CHAPTER 5. Sounds in BFLA -- Breaking the code -- The sounding world of BFLA children -- Early bilingual speech perception -- Speech perception and word learning -- Making the melody of speech -- Bilingual babbling -- More on melody -- Syllable structure and stress as used by BFLA children -- Bilingual speech segments -- Phonological processes -- Perfecting their skills -- In conclusion -- Summary box -- Suggestions for study activities -- Recommended reading

CHAPTER 6. Words in BFLA -- The words that BFLA children hear -- Early bilingual word comprehension -- Translation equivalents in comprehension -- The Mutual Exclusivity Bias in BFLA -- Early comprehension vocabularies: BFLA and MFLA compared -- Comprehension and production: two sides of the same coin? -- Words and meanings in early production -- Early bilingual word production -- The rate of lexical development in bilingual production -- How many words do BFLA children produce? -- The size of BFLA early production vocabularies compared to MFLA -- Translation equivalents in production -- What drives the production of TEs, or what hinders it? -- Translation equivalents and language choice -- In conclusion -- Summary box -- Suggestions for study activities -- Recommended reading

CHAPTER 7. Sentences in BFLA -- The need for more meanings -- The grammatical status of early word combinations -- Different paths in learning to combine words -- When do BFLA children first start to combine words from scratch? -- Lexical development and the transition into sentences -- Beyond early word combinations: sentences -- Sentences and BFLA children’s language repertoires and language choice -- Unequal skill in Language A and Language Alpha -- The Separate Development Hypothesis: BFLA children’s sentences develop separately in each language -- The Separate Development Hypothesis: methodological issues -- What makes separate development possible? -- Crosslinguistic influence in unilingual utterances -- BFLA compared to MFLA -- BFLA compared to ESLA -- The structural features of mixed utterances -- The development of narrative -- In conclusion -- Summary box -- Suggestions for study activities -- Recommended reading

CHAPTER 8. Harmonious bilingual development -- The whole child -- BFLA: good or bad? -- Comparisons with monolinguals -- Harmonious bilingual development or the lack of it -- And what when BFLA children get older? -- Needed: an alternative research paradigm -- In conclusion -- Summary box -- Suggestions for study activities -- Recommended reading

Resources for parents and educators

Appendices: Appendix A: Subject selection: making sure you are dealing with BFLA -- Appendix B: Behavioral studies of early speech perception in BFLA infants -- Appendix C: Behavioral studies of early phonetic word learning in BFLA infants -- Appendix D: Studies of the use of speech rhythm in young BFLA children -- Appendix E: Studies of the use of speech segments in young BFLA children -- Appendix F: Studies comparing lexical development in MFLA and BFLA/ESLA -- Appendix G: Studies of BFLA supporting the Separate Development Hypothesis -- Appendix H: Main morphosyntactic topics investigated in empirical studies of BFLA supporting the SDH -- Appendix I: Not using particular kinds of grammatical elements and what this might mean in terms of crosslinguistic influence

Glossary

Bibliography

Children’s index

Language index

Subject index

"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." (Book Cover)