The ability to speak two or more languages is a common human experience, whether for children born into bilingual families, young people enrolled in foreign language classes, or mature and older adults learning and using more than one language to meet life's needs and desires. This Handbook offers a developmentally oriented and socially contextualized survey of research into individual bilingualism, comprising the learning, use and, as the case may be, unlearning of two or more spoken and signed languages and language varieties. A wide range of topics is covered, from ideologies, policy, the law, and economics, to exposure and input, language education, measurement of bilingual abilities, attrition and forgetting, and giftedness in bilinguals. Also explored are cross- and intra-disciplinary connections with psychology, clinical linguistics, second language acquisition, education, cognitive science, neurolinguistics, contact linguistics, and sign language research.

Explores the processes of monolingual language development in pre-school children. Following an overview of child bilingualism, this book looks at the influence of the child's family environment and the factors which predict the language use of the child.

1. Bilingual phenomena -- 2. Ten perspectives on bilingualism -- 3. A functional architecture of bilingualism -- 4. Four processing mechanisms in bilingual production -- 5. Accounting for bilingual phenomena with the SPPL model -- 6. Acquisition, attrition, and language disturbances in bilingualism.

This book examines sociolinguistic, educational and psycholinguistic factors that shape the path to sign bilingualism in deaf individuals and contributes to a better understanding of the specific characteristics of a type of bilingualism that is neither territorial nor commonly the result of parent-to-child transmission. The evolution of sign bilingualism at the individual level is discussed from a developmental linguistics perspective on the basis of a longitudinal investigation of deaf learners' bilingual acquisition of German sign language (DGS) and German. The case studies included in this volume offer unique insights into bilingual deaf learners’ sign language and written language productions, and the sophisticated nature of the bilingual competence they attain. Commonalities and differences between sign bilingual language development in deaf learners and language development in other language acquisition scenarios are identified on the basis of a dynamic model of change in the evolution of (learner) language, with a focus on the role of language contact in the organisation of multilingual knowledge and the scope of inter- and intra-individual variation in learner grammars. In many respects, as becomes apparent throughout the chapters of this work, sign bilingualism represents not only a challenge but also a resource. Given this cross-disciplinary perspective, the insights on bilingualism and deafness in this volume will be of interest to a wide range of researchers and professionals.

This volume is the outcome of 25 years of research into the neurolinguistic aspects of bilingualism. In addition to reviewing the world literature and providing a state-of-the-art account, including a critical assessment of the bilingual neuroimaging studies, it proposes a set of hypotheses about the representation, organization and processing of two or more languages in one brain. It investigates the impact of the various manners of acquisition and use of each language on the extent of involvement of basic cerebral functional mechanisms. The effects of pathology as a means to understanding the normal functioning of verbal communication processes in the bilingual and multilingual brain are explored and compared with data from neuroimaging studies. In addition to its obvious research benefits, the clinical and social reasons for assessment of bilingual aphasia with a measuring instrument that is linguistically and culturally equivalent in each of a patient’s languages are stressed. The relationship between language and thought in bilinguals is examined in the light of evidence from pathology. The proposed linguistic theory of bilingualism integrates a neurofunctional model (the components of verbal communication and their relationships: implicit linguistic competence, metalinguistic knowledge, pragmatics, and motivation) and a set of hypotheses about language processing (neurofunctional modularity, the activation threshold, the language/cognition distinction, and the direct access hypothesis).

The Bilingualism Reader is the definitive reader for the study of bilingualism. Designed as an integrated and structured student resource it provides invaluable editorial material that guides the reader through different sections and covers: definitions and typology of bilingualism language choice and bilingual interaction bilingualism, identity and ideology grammar of code-switching and bilingual acquisition bilingual production and perception the bilingual brain methodological issues in the study of bilingualism. The second edition of this best selling volume includes nine new chapters and postscripts written by the authors of the original articles, who evaluate them in the light of recent research. Critical discussion of research methods, revised graded study questions and activities, a comprehensive glossary, and an up-to-date resource list make The Bilingualism Reader an essential introductory text for students of linguistics, psychology and education.