A comprehensive theory of child language acquisition requires an evidential base that is representative of the typological diversity present in the world's 7000 or so languages. However, languages are dying at an alarming rate, and the next 50 years represents the last chance we have to document acquisition in many of them. Here, we take stock of…

While acquisition of more than one language from birth is a relatively common phenomenon, whether children under two years of age use their languages in a differentiated manner has not yet been established. The current study investigates the pragmatic differentiation of a child who lives in Australia and was acquiring two minority languages,…

An area in need of study in child language acquisition is that of complex multilingual contexts in which there is little language separation by interlocutor or domain. Little is known about how multilingual children use language to construct their identities in each language or in both languages. Identity construction in monolingual contexts has…

The study examines strategies multilingual children use to interpret grammatical relations, focusing on their two primary languages, Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri. Both languages use mixed systems for indicating grammatical relations. In both languages ergative-absolutive case-marking indicates core arguments, but to different extents in…

Major innovations are becoming available for research in language development and disorders. Among these innovations, recent tools allow naturalistic recording in children's homes and automated analysis to facilitate representative sampling. This study employed all-day recordings during the 2nd year of life in a child exposed to three languages,…

Examines results of a study of samples of babbling production of 6, 8, and 10-month-old infants from French, Arabic, and Cantonese backgrounds. Various judges were asked to identify those infants from their own linguistics community, with the intention of supporting hypothesis of an early influence on babbling of metaphonological characteristics…

A study examined language socialization in Dominica (West Indies), focusing on the use of a French-based creole, Patwa, in a situation of linguistic and social change. Despite claims that Patwa is integral to Dominican identity, rural caregivers choose to speak English to language-learning children, contributing to rapid attrition of Patwa.…

This study continues a series of reports on the work of the team which has carried out a sociolinguistic survey of multilingual communities. This study deals with an early sample of the results of the St. Lucian survey, and in particular with the extent to which they provide support for the theoretical model of linguistic choice and change, and…

The present study discusses and describes codeswitches produced by two trilingual children acquiring English, Spanish and Hebrew simultaneously from birth. Data were collected regularly over a period of 20 months (from age 2;6 to 4;2 for M and from age 5;5 to 7;1 for E), in naturalistic tape-recorded sessions. Codeswitches drawn from…

Infant bilingualism can be defined as a child being exposed to two or more languages from birth. Because of the dearth of first-hand research on the effect of a bilingual environment on a child's speaking patterns, parents from multilingual backgrounds raised their daughter in a bilingual environment, German and Spanish, in England. They speak to…

The collection of essays on language contact and language conflict includes: "Language Choices: Contact and Conflict?" (Martin Putz); "Language Ecology: Contact Without Conflict" (Peter Muhlhausler); "Towards a Dynamic View of Multilingualism" (Ulrike Jessner); "A Matter of Choice" (Florian Coulmas); The…