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WHAT, WHERE and WHY: On the role of input in bilingual language acquisition

Sharon Unsworth (Utrecht University)

One of the salient characteristics of bilingual language acquisition is variability. Bilingual children often vary in their rate of acquisition and in the proficiency level which they ultimately attain. Considerable variability also exists in bilingual children鈥檚 language environment: this may differ significantly within and across children in terms of both quantity and quality. In this talk I evaluate the impact of a number of 鈥榪uantity-颅鈥恛riented鈥� and 鈥榪uality-颅鈥恛riented鈥� exposure variables (following Paradis 2011 and Place and Hoff 2011, a.o.) to determine WHAT aspects of bilingual children鈥檚 input may be relevant.聽 The 鈥榪uantity- 鈥恛riented鈥� variables include language at home, language at school, cumulative length of exposure and child鈥檚 output, and聽 the 鈥榪uality-颅鈥恛riented鈥� are richness, proportion of native聽 exposure, no. of monolingual and variety of conversational partners. I examine WHERE in the system, i.e., which linguistic domain, input effects are observed, and whether 鈥榩rofile effects鈥�, as predicted by Oller et al. (2007), are attested. Finally, I consider WHY (quantitative and/or qualitative) differences in the input should affect bilingual language development, exploring the constructivist and generative answers to this question by drawing on work by Gathercole (2007) and Yang (2002, 2007).