Language mode, contexts and linguistic environment

In this section, I will elaborate on the sociolinguistic dimensions of bilingual development. Grosjean (1998, p. 136), proposed the notion of “language mode”, which is defined as “a state of activation of the bilingual’s languages and language processing mechanisms at a given point in time. In their daily lives, bilinguals would find themselves constantly switching between monolingual and bilingual language mode; in monolingual mode, bilinguals would find themselves interacting with monolinguals in one of the languages they know, thus one language is active, and the other is deactivated. For bilingual mode, both languages are activated, as the bilinguals are interacting with other bilinguals who share their two languages. Thus, in bilingual

Unitary Language System (ULS) • Proposed by Volterra & Taeschner

(1978).

• Bilingual children developed one fused language system before gradually distinguishing the different languages.

Separate Development Hypothesis (SDH)

• Proposed by De Houwer (1990). • Bilingual children instantly separate

the two languages from early on. • Current research seems to favour this

notion.

Autonomous versus Interdependent development • Autonomous development- the two

languages develop independently without interaction (Paradis & Genesee, 1996).

• Interdependent development- the developing languages show interactions which lead to crosslinguistic influences (CLI).

Crosslinguistic Influences (CLI) • CLI occurs because of the

competing grammatical structures: cross-linguistic cue competition (Dopke, 1998) and syntactic- pragmatic interface (Hulk and Muller, 2000).

• CLI is attributed to language

dominance (Yip & Matthews, 2007). The dominant language influences the less-dominant language.

• CLI occurs because of error in speech processing (Nicoladis & Gavrila, 2015).

mode, bilingual speakers tend to use mixing and code switching. In his response to Muller’s article (1998) on language transfer in BFLA, Grosjean states that it is highly likely that in obtaining data from the bilingual children, the bilingual researchers might have set the stage for bilingual mode. In fact, it has been observed that researchers rarely control the language mode of their bilingual participants (Odlin, 1989); this observation is also corroborated by studies in BFLA (Genesee, 1989; Goodz, 1989; Meisel, 1989). Consequently, because the participants are in bilingual mode, it is hard to distinguish whether the language mixing produced during the tests/recordings is truly an instance of language interferences or perhaps just normal mixing activated by the bilingual language mode. In this thesis, the monolingual and bilingual language mode can be observed in the contexts of the recordings (the recordings will be elaborated in Chapter 4 Methodology).

Talking about contexts, in many BFLA studies, those investigating the role of contexts are scarce (Lanza, 2004). There is far too much emphasis on the linguistic structures produced by the dual language acquirers rather than the situational contexts in which communication takes place. The contexts in which these bilingual youngsters acquire their languages are treated as a given background variable. However, bilingual children’s knowledge of each of their developing languages is distributed in nature; for example, they may learn certain words from school domain and learn another set of words from home (Oller & Jarmulowicz, 2007). This property of bilingual learning is what Oller and Pearson (2002) termed as “the distributed characteristic”; children acquiring two languages tend to learn the vocabularies of each of the language without a translation equivalent in the other language. Thus, the concepts they learn in each language is lexicalised and distributed across the two languages, and this is particularly evident for young bilingual children (Oller, 2005). In the thesis, the distributive nature is evident in Rina’s lexical mixing, which I will describe in the lexical development section (section 5.3).

Related to the contexts in which bilingual children learn the language is the input. De Houwer (2009) defines regular input as the daily contact with a language through interpersonal interaction or by overhearing the language. For bilingual children, the influence of input offer an interesting situation; whereas for monolingual children the input they receive is 100% from one language, bilingual children receive some fraction of the daily input from their two developing languages (Bialystok, 2001). In this study, the input I specifically refer to is the linguistic environment that the bilingual child is exposed to. According to Unsworth (2016), various factors may

affect bilingual children’s linguistic environments, which include parental language strategy, the status of the language(s), siblings and birth order, amongst others. All these factors may influence the amount of input, hence contributing to the variability in bilingual children’s language experiences. Input is also divided into two types; the quantitative and qualitative properties of input. These two properties of input may influence the rate of bilingual children’s language development (Sorace, 2005). Studies investigating input quantity include the amount of exposure the bilingual children received at home versus at school (Chondrogianni & Marinis, 2011; Gathercole & Thomas, 2009) and their gradual cumulative exposure in the two languages (Gutiérrez-Clellen & Kreiter, 2003; Unsworth, 2013). While for input quality, the focus has been given to the “richness of children’s language input” (Unsworth, 2016,p. 157) such as the input the children received from different sources (Jia & Fuse, 2007) and whether the interlocutors are L1 or L2 speakers (Place & Hoff, 2011). For this thesis, the linguistic environment included in the analyses is the quantitative input that Rina received, i.e. I examined her estimated amount of exposure in English and Malay in both the longitudinal study as well as the elicitation sessions at age 4;8.

One study that reported the effect of the linguistic environment on bilingual children’s acquisition is by Barrena, Ezeizabarrena, and Garcia (2008), who investigates the effect of the linguistic environment on the development of the lexicon and grammar of Basque bilingual children in longitudinal and cross-sectional studies. The authors examine two variables in the input; the degree of exposure to Basque at home as well as the linguistic competence of the parents. The participants were divided into three groups; monolingual children (M), categorised as having more than 90 per cent Basque input, bilingual children with Basque-dominant input (BB), categorises as having 60-90% Basque input and bilingual children from non-dominant Basque family environment (BR), classified as having less than 60% input.

In the longitudinal study, no significant differences were found between the monolingual (M) and bilingual-Basque dominant (BB) group in terms of the production of vocabulary, MLU, and some grammatical suffixes. For the cross- sectional study, it was found that input exposure has a strong influence on the lexical and grammatical development from age 23-24 months and especially more so after 27-28 months when the mean vocabulary size exceeds 300 words. This finding shows that the differences between groups are more pronounced when the critical mass of their vocabulary is consolidating (Bates, Bretherton, & Snyder, 1988; Marchman &

Bates, 1994). In the cross-sectional study, it was also found that children from non- dominant Basque environment scored lower on vocabulary size, complexity and morphological production. Also, children whose both parents speak Basque indicate higher vocabulary size, longer MLU and more complex grammatical production. The conclusion reached by the authors is that the degree of presence of Basque influences the development of lexicon as well grammar of the bilingual children. As the bilingual child’s linguistic environment in this study changed throughout the period of investigation, we will see whether the changes in the environment affect her language development as well.