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CHILDHOOD BILINGUALISM: RESEARCH ON INFANCY THROUGH SCHOOL AGE. Peggy McCardle and Erika Hoff (Eds.). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2006. Pp. x + 170.

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CHILDHOOD BILINGUALISM: RESEARCH ON INFANCY THROUGH SCHOOL AGE. Peggy McCardle and Erika Hoff (Eds.). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2006. Pp. x + 170.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2010

Virginia Yip
Virginia Yip*
Affiliation:
Chinese University of Hong Kong
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Book Notices
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Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , March 2010 , pp. 157
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

This star-studded volume is based on a workshop on childhood bilingualism held in 2004 with many renowned researchers in the field as contributors. The emerging field of childhood bilingualism is well served by this timely volume that aims to establish a foundation and research agenda for years to come. The volume consists of 11 articles and is divided into five parts that cover (a) language processing, (b) cognitive and social development, (c) literacy development, (d) other perspectives from adult bilingualism and crosslinguistic research, and (e) closing comments.

The field of childhood bilingualism ranges from bilingual first language acquisition to child SLA, from infancy to early and later childhood. Regardless of the type of childhood bilingualism, the bilingual child is not two monolinguals in one brain; this message is propounded by more than one contribution in this volume. An overall theory of childhood bilingualism will need to be developed to address issues of epistemology and differences between bilinguals and monolinguals.

A salient issue that at the same time vexes and tantalizes researchers is the ever-present heterogeneity in the population of bilingual children with regard to variables such as age of exposure, amount of input in each language, dominance, and outcomes. A challenge that any researcher has to confront is the role of the dual input in shaping children’s bilingual development and language dominance. Detailed analysis of the quality and quantity of the input in each language will promote the understanding of how bilingualism develops in the child.

With most contributors being from the United States and Canada, the language pairs investigated overwhelmingly involve English together with other Indo-European languages, such as French, Spanish, and Welsh, with the exception of two studies that include Cantonese and one that involves Hebrew. Although the issues and views presented are of universal validity and amenable to crosslinguistic application, the languages under investigation represent a small fraction of the diversity of languages acquired in bilingual and multilingual contexts.

McCardle and Hoff conclude with an agenda that calls for new measures to chart bilingualism across the life span. Extending the focus to language pairs outside of the Indo-European domain can be added to this agenda.