Do children who acquire three languages from an early age acquire them as if they were learning each language separately or as one linguistic system? How does the acquisition process evolve when considering three languages as different as English, Spanish, and Basque? These are two of the questions raised by the volume under review.
Chapter 1 provides a review of the literature on bilingual and trilingual acquisition, focusing on issues such as the evidence for one or two systems, the variables that intervene in trilingualism, and language choice.
The second chapter gives the reader linguistic background on question forms and their acquisition. Specifically, it deals with the acquisition of yes/no questions and wh-questions and related matters, such as inversion and auxiliary insertion. A second section of the chapter is devoted to a detailed review of child pragmatic competence and how it relates to questions and requests. Finally, the last section addresses the function of feedback in questions and the interaction between the adult and the child. A few pages at the end of the chapter provide a sketch of question formation and the acquisition of questions in Basque and Spanish.
The study sought to investigate four main issues (chapter 3): (a) the acquisition of English questions by a trilingual child (English, Basque, and Spanish) as compared to other monolingual and bilingual children, (b) the child's communicative competences as evidenced by her use of questions, (c) the relationship between the input received by the child and her use of questions in English, and (d) transfer from Spanish and Basque in the production of English questions by the child. The subject of the study (Jenny) was the author's daughter, who at the time was living in the Basque Country (Spain) in a mostly Basque-speaking environment. Conversations between mother and child were recorded from ages 1;11 to 3;6 for a total of 32 sessions.
The results of the study (chapter 4) provide evidence that Jenny's mean length of utterance and other measurements for English questions were in line with those of monolingual and bilingual children of comparable age. The development of yes/no questions and wh-questions showed that the use of declarative (intonation) questions was higher in Jenny than in previous studies and that she applied correct inversion and auxiliary insertion in wh-forms later than in other studies. Jenny's pragmatic competence seems richer than in subjects from earlier studies in that at an early age (1;11) she can use questions for a variety of functions (e.g., to attract attention and show surprise). The author argues that the input provided by the mother plays a role in the child's production of questions, because question type and feedback between the mother and the child tended to match. The data regarding the mother's behavior indicate that the questions and feedback provided by her were similar to those of other studies. Finally, it is argued that Basque played a role in Jenny's production of English questions in several respects: subject repetition in questions, word order, confusion of wh-words, lexicon, and overuse of specific structures (is + 0/it/this/that? and wh + it/this/that?). Chapter 5, “Interpretation of Findings,” is more a summary of results than an in-depth discussion of them.
As in most case studies, what is a main strength—depth of analysis, longitudinal study of acquisition—can become a weakness both in theoretical and stylistic terms. Thus, the author acknowledges that further studies are needed to corroborate the findings in this study of one child. Regarding the style of the volume, the study reads more like a dissertation or an expanded research paper with too much detail (e.g., 21 tables and 49 figures in chapter 4) rather than a published book on early trilingualism. It would have been helpful to provide more discussion of the general issues raised in the introductory chapter and focus on theoretical issues instead of providing so many tables and figures. Finally, the analysis of crosslinguistic influence acknowledges the difficulty of separating what is a crosslinguistic error from a developmental error but does not analyze this problem sufficiently. Thus, the reader is left with too brief a sketch of question formation in Basque and Spanish (chapter 2) and a list of possible areas of influence without solid quantitative evidence for it. Despite these drawbacks, the author should be commended for embarking on the difficult task of describing early trilingualism longitudinally. In this sense, this volume adds to the growing body of literature on trilingualism and will be of great interest to scholars in language acquisition.
