Managing linguistic boundaries in early trilingual development

Productive Trilingualism in Infancy: What Makes it Possible?

“…Reporting the main findings of Montanari (2009a), this section focuses on Kathryn's ability to modify her patterns of language use following the language of her interlocutors. Recall that this was the topic of Quay's (2001;2008) and Chevalier's (2011) studies, which revealed that trilingual-to-be children differ in the extent to which they can make active use of the minority languages when interacting with speakers of those languages. This section specifically examines Kathryn's patterns of language choice with Tagalog, Spanish, and English speakers at age 1;10 to assess: (1) whether evidence for pragmatic differentiation could be found even before age two and within a mixed language context, where the child was being simultaneously confronted by distinct language users; (2) whether lack of proficiency was responsible for her choice of one language over another; (3) whether the child's language choice was affected by the interlocutors' language preferences and their responses to language mixing.…”

“…Quay (2001Quay ( , 2008, for example, who investigated two developing trilingual children's ability to modify their language use following the language preferences of the interlocutors -and hence speak three languages, found strikingly different results for the two children. In particular, in her first investigation (Quay, 2001), a developing Japanese-English-German trilingual boy growing up in Japan failed to show much use of the two minority languages while addressing his parents between 1;1 and 1;10, limiting himself to the use of Japanese.…”

“…Quay (2001Quay ( , 2008, for example, who investigated two developing trilingual children's ability to modify their language use following the language preferences of the interlocutors -and hence speak three languages, found strikingly different results for the two children. In particular, in her first investigation (Quay, 2001), a developing Japanese-English-German trilingual boy growing up in Japan failed to show much use of the two minority languages while addressing his parents between 1;1 and 1;10, limiting himself to the use of Japanese. In a second study, however, Quay (2008) found that a two-year-old girl being raised in Chinese, Japanese, and English in Japan did use three languages with different language users, following her interlocutors' language preferences, their proficiency in each language, and their expectations as to appropriate language use.…”

“…Unlike BFLA, the study of early trilingualism has not received much attention, at least until very recently, and research on the simultaneous development of three languages is literally in its infancy (Barnes, 2011;Chevalier, 2011;Kazzazi, 2011;Montanari, 2009aMontanari, , 2009bMontanari, , 2010Montanari, , 2011aQuay, 2001Quay, , 2008Quay, , 2011b. Most studies on trilingualism deal indeed with the acquisition of a third language later in childhood (such as through schooling), or with the role bilingualism plays when acquiring a third language (see Cenoz, 2003, Cenoz & Hoffman, 2003, and Stavans & Swisher, 2006, to name a few).…”

“…Studies on Trilingual First Language Acquisition (TFLA), that is, on the development of three languages from birth, are either very little systematic in how they report input characteristics, data collection, analyses, etc. (see Quay, 2001, and Hoffman, 2001, for a review); they often amount to a few case studies that explore specific themes such as cross-linguistic influence (Kazzazi, 2011), code-switching after age three (Edwards & Dewaele, 2007;Hoffmann & Stavans, 2007;Stavans & Muchnik, 2008;Stavans & Swisher, 2006), or the relationship between input and development in one language (Barnes, 2006;; or they are anecdotal reports of individual cases of trilingual acquisition at times addressed to the general public (Maneva, 2004;Wang, 2008). In sum, systematic, longitudinal analyses of early trilingualism are scarce.…”