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Transilvania University of Brașov
Faculty of Languages and Literatures
II
nd
year; E.F.
Language and Society
Research Proposal:
Second language acquisition in an
infant born into a bilingual family
Student: Ioana-Cristina GUZU
Brașov
2014

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A.INTRODUCTION
We use language every day not just the simple utterance but also body language, written language,
the language of pictures, feelings and so on and so forth. We do not really acknowledge the entire
process and the meaning of it. We make small talk, we frown, we send a text message, share a
picture on social media but we do not see it as it is, language. From a deeper point of view language
is a way of communication that belongs only to the human race. We often take this for granted,
forgetting how hard it is in the first place to start speaking. A toddler is learning to speak by the
very ways of imitating. But this covers only half of the process. The toddler is creating new “rules”
(in a loose meaning of the word) and, as the time goes by, he matures in the speech production.
This transition is not a fast one, the child is moving from simple to complex not at once, but in
steps. The toddler is upgrading his rules of producing speech to the rules of the adults around him,
as soon as he begins to notice the differences between the two sets of rules. The process of language
acquisition is a time consuming one for every child and it does not develop at once, it is hard and
it takes a lot of patience from the people around the child. If the process is so hard for a monolingual
child, researchers raise the issue whether or not a child with a bilingual family encounters
difficulties in his process of language acquisition.
The acquisition of a second language in bilingual families became a more important issue as the
immigration and emigration grew and that was well acknowledged in the ’80.
Nowadays, thanks to the globalization, more and more bilingual families are born. We have seen
how a child learns to speak, but a how does a child manage to learn two languages? Does he
follows the same pattern or there is more hidden under the cover? What are the chances of the first
language (L1) to interfere with the second one (L2)?
“Language is one of humanity’s greatest achievements, and yet one which virtually all children
achieve remarkably quickly. How much more remarkable then when children learn to use not one
but two languages?(Lyon, 1996:1)
Annick de Hower was one of the pioneers in this research study. According to her : simultaneous
bilingualism takes place in children who are regularly addressed in two spoken languages from
before the age of two and who continue to be regularly addressed in those languages up until the
final stages of language development.(De Hower,1996:56)

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Transilvania University of Brașov Faculty of Languages and Literatures IInd year; E.F. Language and Society Research Proposal: Second language acquisition in an infant born into a bilingual family Student: Ioana-Cristina GUZU Brașov 2014 A.INTRODUCTION We use language every day not just the simple utterance but also body language, written language, the language of pictures, feelings and so on and so forth. We do not really acknowledge the entire process and the meaning of it. We make small talk, we frown, we send a text message, share a picture on social media but we do not see it as it is, language. From a deeper point of view language is a way of communication that belongs only to the human race. We often take this for granted, forgetting how hard it is in the first place to start speaking. A toddler is learning to speak by the very ways of imitating. But this covers only half of the process. The toddler is creating new “rules” (in a loose meaning of the word) and, as the time goes by, he matures in the speech production. This transition is not a fast one, the child is moving from simple to complex not at once, but in steps. The toddler is upgrading his rules of producing speech to the rules of the adults around him, as soon as he begins to notice the differences between the two sets of rules. The process of language acquisition is a time consuming one for every child and it does not develop at once, it is hard and it takes a lot of patience from t ...
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