Productive Trilingualism in Infancy: What Makes it Possible?

Abstract

This article summarizes the results of a case study on the development of three languages in a child exposed to Tagalog, Spanish, and English from birth. The paper brings together findings from phonology, lexicon, word order, and language choice, providing a detailed picture of the emergence of the four components of three languages in infancy. The paper further explores the possible mechanisms upon which multiple language representations could be built, and then, it examines what characteristics of the environment and of the individual child might lead to the development and active use of three languages in infancy. The results suggest that the build-up of multiple language systems might follow naturally from trilingual exposure; yet, factors such as quantity and quality of language exposure, linguistic relatedness among languages, the child's personality, and the nature of the social context may dramatically influence trilingual competence in infancy and early childhood.

The Multilingual Inner Discourse of Vietnamese-Hungarian Bilinguals in Solving an L3 Problem-Solution Task: An Exploratory Study

“…Empirical research comes to supplement and illustrate how the wax and wane of language mastery takes place in everyday life. Evidence regarding the dynamic and reshaping character of language competence and use are found in language acquisition studies exploring native language change in second-language immersion contexts (De Bot & Clyne, 1994), native language maintenance in second-language learning contexts (Dorian, 1982), the interdependence of learnt foreign languages in the mental lexicon (Fouser, 2001), and the simultaneous acquisition of three languages (Montanari, 2013).…”

The Development of Childhood Multilingualism in Languages of Different Modalities

“…Hofmann & Chilla, 2015;Kanto, 2016;Lillo-Martin, de Quadros, Chen Pichler & Fieldsteel, 2014) or on the multilingualism of children acquiring different spoken languages (see e.g. Mieszkowska et al, 2017;Montanari, 2013). To date, only a few recent studies have focused on the multifaceted multilingualism of the signing community and, more specifically, on the multilingualism of deaf and hearing children (e.g.…”