Language Mixing in Infant Bilingualism: A Sociolinguistic Perspective

by Elizabeth Lanza

Overview

This study examines the simultaneous acquisition of Norwegian and English by two first-born children each with one American and one Norwegian parent. Lanza investigates the issue of language mixing in relation to language dominance and the child's differentiation between the two languages in relation to the communicative demands of the context.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198235750
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/08/1997
Series:	Oxford Studies in Language Contact
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.50(h) x 1.07(d)
Lexile:	1370L (what's this?)

About the Author

Elizabeth Lanza is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Oslo. She is currently involved in a project on multilingual education in elementary schools in Ethiopia.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction2. Language Mixing: Some Psycholinguistic, Neurolinguistic, and Sociolinguistic Issues3. A Study in Infant Bilingualism4. Language Mixing by the Young Bilingual Child: Some Formal Aspects5. Language Choice by the Young Bilingual Child: Form and Function in Discourse6. Language Mixing and Language Input: Parental Discourse Strategies7. ConclusionAppendicesReferences

Editorial Reviews

"Language Mixing and Infant Bilingualism, which is, incidentally, very well edited, continues to make a useful and important contribution to the field, because of its balanced framing of the issues, the clarity of its exposition, its varied analyses, and its validation of the sociolinguistic approach."—Linguist List 16.1591

"A timely contribution to the field of bilingual acquisition research....offers a rare but much needed social-interactional and context-based perspective on early bilingual development....the main strength of Lanza's approach....lies in the highly detailed and insightful analyses of the dynamics of parent-child interactions and their effect on children's language choice....Lanza has done the field of bilingual acquisition research a great favor by drawing attention to the more sociolinguistic, interactional aspects of early bilingual development.... future research into bilingual acquisition can now no longer ignore the importance of the sociolinguistic dimension of learning to speak more than one language from infancy."—Anthropological Linguistics

From the Publisher