The whole and its parts: Reflections on bilingual first language acquisition

Despite growing interest in child language acquisition, research into the simultaneous acquisition of two languages has so far been the exception. This contrasts with the observation that there is certainly no shortage in popular and mostly negative opinions about childhood multilingualism. The present paper takes a linguistic approach to bilingual first language acquisition. Following a short introduction to current issues in bilingualism research, specific syntactic contrasts between German and English will be used to predict possible domains of interference, interference, On the basis of available longitudinal data it will be shown that the existence of these contrasts does not necessarily slow down the acquisition process or lead to permanent insecurities. Special attention will be given to mixed utterances because they provide evidence for children's ability to pool their linguistic resources.