Anthology of Bilingual Child Phonology

This edited book is a collection of studies on protolanguage phonology, referring to the development of children’s autonomous linguistic systems from their first meaningful forms to complete cognitive and articulatory acquisition of language. The volume comprises chapters on child bilingual phonological development, understood as the acquisition or use of more than one linguistic code, whether actual languages, dialects, or communication modes, in an array of contexts. Such contexts include endogenous and exogenous bilingualism, heritage language, bilectalism, trilingualism, and typical and atypical use. The contributed works here will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students investigating language acquisition in bi-/multilingual settings, as well as those working on child phonological development across a variety of languages.

A state-of-the-art volume by two visionary scholars dedicated to the study of bilingual child phonology, this timely collection features contributions from leading scholars addressing typical and atypical development in monolingual, bilingual and trilingual populations across diverse acquisition contexts and language pairs. Together they make a stunning contribution to an under-researched area of bilingual development., This anthology is a welcome contribution to the field of bi/multilingual child phonological development, offering new insights from various acquisition perspectives including bilingualism, bilectalism, trilingualism, heritage language, typical and atypical use. The cross-linguistic collection of studies spans a range of languages and diverse methodologies, advocating some novel solutions to long-standing debates. It will be a valuable reference for students and experienced scholars alike.

Elena Babatsouli is Assistant Professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA. She has edited On Under-reported Monolingual Child Phonology and co-edited Crosslinguistic Encounters in Language Acquisition with David Ingram and Nicole Müller (Multilingual Matters), among other volumes. She co-edits with Martin Ball the Journal of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech (Equinox).Martin J. Ball is Honorary Professor at the University of Bangor, Wales. He is a lead journal and book-series editor and a prominent figure in clinical linguistics/phonetics with numerous monographs and edited books, including most recently Grammatical Profiles: Further Languages of LARSP (co-edited with Paul Fletcher and David Crystal, Multilingual Matters).