bilingual acquisition methodology references

[Barbara Pearson]

Dear Bill,

Of course, I can start by recommending you look at my book, Raising a  
Bilingual Child (and the on-line notes that accompany it).  It will  
give you an overview and also point you to a lot of specific studies.  http://www.zurer.com/pearson/bilingualchild

You are placing yourself in a long line of great parent-researchers  
following their infant bilinguals: Leopold, Fantini, Vihman, Lanza,  
Deuchar, to name just a few who have published comprehensively and in  
detail about their children's early bilingual development.  (Btw, your  
own situation reminds me most of Fantini (1985).  Many, many others  
have published about one aspect or another of their child's or of  
other people's children's simultaneous dual language acquisition.   
Then groups like our Bilingualism Study Group in Miami followed 25  
babies from soon after birth to age three.

People usually rely on a combination of diary notes and (laborious)  
transcriptions of systematic recordings in different language  
contexts, either audio or video, plus occasional mini-experiments to  
probe more carefully what the child understands.  (Tom Roeper's book,  
The Prism of Grammar, will give you some ideas about  
"explorations" (*simple* set-ups around the house) you can use to find  
more subtle details of the child's developing grammar that may not  
come up in everyday situations.)

As I mentioned in an earlier note to you, you may have a technical  
advantage over previous researchers in that the LENA system will allow  
you to collect larger volumes of data (in informal situations), will  
do some automated analyses, and will help you organize your  
transcriptions.  Kim Oller at the University of Memphis, another  
bilingual researcher and colleague, has been using the LENA system  
with his tri-lingual daughter.  He is very enthusiastic about it--and  
I'll be surprised if he doesn't answer you himself on CHILDES, but if  
he doesn't, I'm sure he will have many methodological suggestions for  
you.

Best of luck.  Please feel free to come back to me with more specific  
questions.

Barbara

On Dec 31, 2009, at 6:27 AM, Bill Rago wrote:

> Hello info-CHILDES members, thanks in advance for your responses -
> they are greatly appreciated.
>
> I am interested in simultaneous bilingualism and the methodology used
> to study it but I don't have extensive experience with the
> literature.  My background is in TESOL so I haven't really read much
> about the study of early language acquisition methodology (babbling,
> first words).  I have a 7-month old son that's exposed to Korean and
> English and I want to do a longitudinal case study of his dual
> language development starting at 10 months and I am looking for other
> studies or books that cover the methodology used to collect data,
> methods of analysis, and transcription of the data.
>
> Thank you and Happy New Year!
>
> -Bill Rago
>
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************************************************
Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph.D.
Research Associate, Depts of Linguistics and   Communication Disorders
c/o 226 South College
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Amherst MA 01003

bpearson at research.umass.edu
http://www.umass.edu/aae/bp_indexold.htm
http://www.zurer.com/pearson/bilingualchild

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