one-parent one-language/Grammont's principle

[Erika Hoff]

As I report in my textbook, I looked and found no scientific basis for this
piece of advice. Of course, that doesn't make it false. However, the
research on bilingual infants' speech perception suggests that children
exposed to two languages are capable of distinguishing them on the basis of
phonological properties and don't need social indicators of which language
is being used.

As I read, Genesee, Crago, and Paradis's work on bilingual children with
language impairments it suggests that they have similar problems in both
their languages but not problems unique to being bilingual.

Erika Hoff


-----Original Message-----
From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org [mailto:info-childes at mail.talkbank.org]
On Behalf Of Madalena Cruz-Ferreira
Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2005 1:42 AM
To: Betty Yu; info-childes at mail.talkbank.org
Subject: RE: one-parent one-language/Grammont's principle

Hi Betty,

One of my students, Hazel See, has done some work on this here in Singapore
for Mandarin-English bilinguals.
She has presented two papers, where she argues that a mixed-language policy
is no different from the OPOL policy in nurturing competent child
multilingualism, and that child mixes are evidence not of confusion but of
pragmatic fluency that matches that of the child's environment.
The references are:

See, H. L. C. (2004). The mixed languages policy as a viable alternative to
the one person-one language policy: a case study. Paper presented to the 6th
Conference on General Linguistics, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela.

See, H. L. C. (2004). Exploring the role of caregivers' pragmatic discourse
strategies in mixed languages policy bilingualism. Paper presented to the
Second Lisbon Meeting on Language Acquisition, Faculdade de Letras,
Universidade de Lisboa.

Hazel is with the info-childes network, so she might want to add details on
her research.

Madalena

======================================
Madalena Cruz-Ferreira
Dept. English Language and Literature
National University of Singapore
ellmcf at nus.edu.sg
http://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/ellmcf/
======================================


> -----Original Message-----
> From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org
> [mailto:info-childes at mail.talkbank.org]On Behalf Of Betty Yu
> Sent: Tuesday, 19 April, 2005 1:07 PM
> To: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org
> Subject: one-parent one-language/Grammont's principle
>
>
> Hello all,
>
>   I am curious if there is convergence in current research on the
> usefulness (or not) of separating languages as a strategy for
> teaching
> children more than one language (e.g., one-parent/one-language,
> one-situation/one-language). Is there evidence that children really
> become confused by mixed linguistic input given that there's evidence
> that code-switching and other language mixing behaviors are quite
> normal in bilingual communities? I'm especially interested in this
> topic as it relates to children with language impairments.
>
> Thank you for your attention.
>
> Betty
> Doctoral Student at UC Berkeley/SFSU
>
>
>