International Journal of Bilingualism

This paper reports on a project on trilingualism currently in progress. A brief literature review indicates the diversity of trilingualism and trilingual situations. The paper then focuses on three sets of trilinguals in Melbourne-Dutch-German-English, Hungarian-German-English, and Italian-Spanish-English, and considers interlingual strategies employed by them. The three main types are: conversion rules indicative of a multilateral competence covering closely related languages, interlingual identification based on correspondences between two of the languages, and code-switching in which English transfers or bilingual compromise forms trigger switches between two other languages. Depending on the typology of the languages, trilinguals will differ in their strategies. Implications for processing models are given some preliminary consideration.

This paper focuses on a group of bilingual children within a large cohort of children with specific language impairment (SLI) attending language units attached to mainstream primary schools across England. Comparison of the bilingual children with their monolingual peers revealed differential performance on standardized speech and language assessment measures. Further analysis suggested that children with semantic and/or pragmatic difficulties perform differently to those without such difficulties, and that the relationships between bilinguals' and monolinguals' scores are substantially different for these two groups. Bilingual children were found to have less of a variety of combinations of language difficulties than their monolingual peers, although this was not found to have a direct influence on their test scores. However, accounting for severity of difficulties went some way towards explaining the difference on test scores for one group of bilingual children. This paper seeks to set these preliminary results in the context of current knowledge about the assessment and treatment of bilingual pupils in special educational needs provision within mainstream schools, and to inform further research in this somewhat neglected area.

Language contact in the speech of children acquiring two languages simultaneously has been claimed to be qualitatively different from that of older more mature bilingual speakers, that is, of their code-switching. This article argues for the position that these patterns of language contact are in fact language encounters of the same kind. The grammatical properties of the young bilingual child's mixed utterances must be analyzed in light of the pragmatic dimensions of language use. Moreover, the type of mixing that occurs may be the result of a general imbalance in language input. Such an imbalance may affect language processing resulting in language dominance. Finally, current work in code-switching, which delineates constraints on language contact, also lends support to the stand that there is no qualitative difference between the mixing patterns of young bilingual two-year-olds and that of more mature bilingual speakers.