Stephen Matthews on Bilingualism in Children

Ten years of research was a labour of love for Professor Stephen Matthews of the Department of Linguistics in the School of Humanities. He and his fellow linguistics expert wife, Professor Virginia Yip of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, were inspired by the birth of their children to produce an award-winning study into the early development of language in a bilingual family. Their son and two daughters were among the subjects of the couple's research that produced new findings on how children acquire two languages from birth and threw fresh light on the acquisition of English and Cantonese in childhood - a hitherto under-researched area.

Using an approach where one parent speaks to the child in one language, and the other parent speaks to the child in another, the two co-directors of the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre observed and recorded regular sessions of their children from the ages of one to two-and-a-half years engaged in daily activities such as playing, reading and role playing. The subjects were encouraged to speak in Cantonese for half an hour and in English for half an hour. The 170 hours of recordings were stored in The Hong Kong Bilingual Child Language Corpus video-linked database and resulted in a groundbreaking book published in 2007, The Bilingual Child: Early Development and Language Contact, which won the prestigious Leonard Bloomfield Book Award from the Linguistic Society of America in 2009. A major conclusion from the research is that parents who delay exposing their children to both languages fearing it will be too much for them to absorb are labouring under a misapprehension.

(Text reproduced from Faculty of Arts 100: A Century in Words and Images.)

Please click on the following link to access the publisher's page: http://www.cambridge.org/hk/academic/subjects/languages-linguistics/psycholinguistics-and-neurolinguistics/bilingual-child-early-development-and-language-contact?format=PB