A Case Study On The Language Development Of A Chinese-English Bilingual Toddler

Western scholars started to explore bilingual acquisition in early last century, and the exploration came in popularity from 1970s. As economic globalization flourishes, people with different cultural and language backgrounds form family and tend to raise bilinguals even multilinguals. Therefore, studies on bilinguals do benefit to families holding such ideas and to scholars for theoretical exploration. It can offer advice and plans to monolinguals holding the idea to obtain another language. However, publications on the development of language acquisition of Chinese (Putonghua)-English bilingual toddlers are few in number.We have the following findings and discussion associated with Carter's early bilingual acquisition on the basis of data collected by means of audiovideo recordings, note and diary records, and telephone records. Through qualitative analyses of the data, this study yields three main findings. Firstly, Carter could differentiate Chinese and English early before his one-word stage, he has acquired most consonants and vowels till he was two years old, and he finished the acquisition of Chinese tones early in the period of speech. Secondly, he started to differentiate two languages at the level of lexicon because of the acquisition of translation equivalents in the early lexical acquisition. Thirdly, at the level of early syntactic acquisition, he made Chinese and English same-language uttereances and mixed utterances, but mixed utterances are due to adults' mixed input, the child's lack of translation equivalents and etc..The conclusive part discusses theoretical implications and limitations of the present study. This thesis has just reported a superficial research on language development of a Chinese-English bilingual toddler and it is open to criticism.