Bilingual Language Acquisition: Spanish and English in the First Six Years by Carmen Silva-Corvalán (review)

Bilingual Language Acquisition: Spanish and English in the First Six Years provides a meticulous and state of the art analysis of the longitudinal development of Spanish and English grammars in two simultaneous bilingual children born and raised in the United States. The children are siblings who were exposed to both languages from birth. The developmental data were obtained via naturalistic interactions with the children from birth to age six, and they are compared with data from English and Spanish monolingual children. The book is divided into eight substantive chapters plus appendices and references. Each chapter provides an analysis of the developmental path taken by the children in areas such as subject realization and placement, word order, copula verbs use and distribution as well as the development of verb, mood and aspectual morphology.

Chapter 1 provides a thorough introduction to theoretical preliminaries of bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA). This includes a discussion of nativist approaches, usage based approaches, language differentiation models and the issue of crosslinguistic influence in bilingual development. Silva-Corvalán also presents an in-depth discussion of the role of transfer (what she calls language influence) and how it differs from crosslinguistic influence. Other important developmental theories are also discussed, including the interface hypothesis, the role of complexity, language dominance and proficiency, as well as the role of input. It ends with an overview of the book and its central goals. This chapter is an excellent introduction to current topics in child bilingual development, which helps the reader understand and contextualize better the discussions presented in the proceeding chapters. In chapter 2, Silva-Corvalán discusses the methodology, analytical methods implemented, the social context of the children and patterns of language use at home. This chapter also offers a detailed analysis of the language dominance and proficiency of the siblings and their mean length of utterance. The analysis provided on the role of crosslinguistic interaction and language dominance in bilingual development is very strong and useful. Chapter 3 presents an overview of the morphosyntactic and lexical development of the siblings. The author discusses typical processes of bilingual development but finds no significant delays compared to monolingual speakers despite reduced input. Chapter 4 examines the realization of subject pronouns in English and Spanish and the role of exposure and use in the acquisition of their discourse-pragmatic constraints among the siblings longitudinally. Chapter 5 elaborates on the development of subject position in English and Spanish and the role of crosslinguistic influence. In chapter 6, Silva-Corvalán discusses the acquisition of copula verbs ser and estar and their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic constraints. She also discusses the acquisition of copula ‘be’ in English. Both siblings showed less difficulty with copula selection and subject placement than with subject realization. Silva-Corvalán argues that the constraints on pronominal subject realization in Spanish are much more complex than those on subject placement and copula selection given the role of the children’s dominant language which reinforces the expression of overt pronominal subjects. Chapter 7 is the most comprehensive and extensive chapter of the book. It provides a thorough discussion of the development of tense, mood and aspect morphology and the children’s patterns of incomplete acquisition on some of the more complex tenses. The author engages in very interesting discussions on the role of input frequency and language use in tense complexity and complexity hierarchy ranging from less complex (1) to most complex (4). This chapter is perhaps the more challenging to follow if the reader is not acquainted with previous research and theoretical frameworks on the acquisition of verb morphology and lexical aspect. The book closes with chapter 8, which provides a thorough overall discussion of the data and conclusions.

Bilingual Language Acquisition: Spanish and English in the First Six Years is excellent, both methodologically and theoretically. Silva-Corvalán skillfully organized the chapters across current and seminal topics in the bilingual...