Bilingual first language acquisition and the mechanisms of substrate influence

Abstract

This paper draws together two fields of study, early bilingual acquisition and language contact, showing close parallels between transfer at the individual and substrate influence at the societal level. Romaine (1996) emphasizes that ‘the bilingual individual is the ultimate locus of language contact’, while Thomason (2001) considers bilingual first language acquisition as a mechanism of contact-induced change which has been relatively little studied to date. Pursuing these two ideas, we show how the developmental patterns in bilingual Cantonese-English children parallel prominent features in a contact variety of English, namely Singapore Colloquial English, spoken by a community of native speakers (Gupta 1994). At the individual ...