Through the systematic examination of bilingual first language acquisition in six children from Cantonese and English so-called one parent–one language families living in Hong Kong, this impressive work greatly expands the understanding of how children become bilingual and sheds new light on language contact patterns. Yip and Matthews carefully investigate the development of grammar in bilingual children using the Hong Kong bilingual child language corpus, compare this development to that of baseline monolingual counterparts found in Cantonese and English corpora, and find “bidirectional cross-linguistic influence” in the bilingual children, who “may take strikingly different paths from monolingual children to reach the target grammar” (p. 256). These findings are strengthened and enriched by the authors’ interdisciplinary approach, innovative methodology, and compelling writing.
One of the most striking strengths of this book can be found in Yip and Matthews’s continued attempts to bridge theoretical frameworks and reconcile seemingly divergent approaches to the study of bilingualism. As indicated in the subtitle, the authors capitalize on a crossfertilization between the fields of bilingual development and contact linguistics to provide a refreshingly open-minded approach to the study of bilingual language acquisition in children. They argue that generative and typological paradigms share ample common ground and provide complimentary views on the analysis of linguistic phenomena. Furthermore, this book extols and falls in line with previous works that have triangulated the study of language acquisition, language contact, and creolization into their framework. This interdisciplinary approach contributes to the comprehensive nature of the work and allows the researchers to provide excellent conclusions and contextualization of their findings within various fields of study.
Another related strength of this work is found in the novel methodology that builds on the time-honored longitudinal case study tradition by using bilingual corpus data, supplementary diary data (helpful in documenting less frequent structures), and additional corpora for statistical comparisons with monolingual children’s development (available through the CHILDES database; MacWhinney, Reference MacWhinney2000). The relatively large number of children studied strengthens the research considerably, along with the longitudinal (spanning ages: 1–4;5), and the naturalistic nature of the dataset. It is also important to note that three of the six children studied were the authors’ own, which creates a parent-researcher role for Yip and Matthews in half of the cases. This, of course, has some advantages (e.g., the opportunity for use of the diary method) and some disadvantages (e.g., the potential for subjectivity).
It seems that Yip and Matthews’s position as both parents and researchers may have benefited the writing of the book, which, in addition to being clear and convincing, displays a tone of continued respect for and curiosity about the remarkable nature of bilingual acquisition. The reader certainly gets a sense that these authors care deeply about the subject matter and are passionate about their contributions to the literature. Certainly, the importance of and need for work pertaining to non-Indo-European and unrelated languages (e.g., Cantonese and English) is undeniable, especially given the current nature of globalization. The authors address this need by providing evidence of syntactic transfer from Cantonese in the case of wh-interrogatives, higher frequency and longevity of null objects in bilingual acquisition than in that of monolinguals, and readily transferable Cantonese pronominal relative clauses. Additionally, Yip and Matthews identify vulnerable domains of grammar in Cantonese (as evidenced by the bidirectionality of crosslinguistic influence even in Cantonese-dominant bilingual children) and explore grammaticalization in circumstances of language contact.
Some scholars may question the extent of the generalizability of Yip and Matthews’s findings to other contexts (which they mention several times in the text); nonetheless, this work will undoubtedly prove useful to students and researchers across many disciplines. Indeed, it is through commendable work such as this that “the study of bilingual acquisition will continue to thrive on being interdisciplinary, drawing on different fields as well as making contributions to them” (p. 263).
