From nominal to pronominal person reference in the early language of a Mandarin-English bilingual child

![CDATA[The development of pronouns in first language acquisition has been studied mainly with reference to monolingual children rather than bilingual first language acquirers. However some pronominal development has been described in a number of bilingual first language acquisition studies (De Houwer 1990; Lanza 1997; Meisel 1990, 1994). These studies, which mainly involved European languages, have reported on, and discussed, the emergence of pronominal forms, the order of acquisition, frequency of use of pronominals in each of two language environments and/or crosslinguistic influences in mixed utterances. The acquisition of the pronominal system has been extensively studied in monolingual L1 research in English and other European languages (Stern, 1900-1918; Huxley,1970; Clark, 1978; Charney,1980; Chiat, 1982; Radford, 1995; Rispoli, 1998; Deutsch et al. 2001). However, the transition from nominal person references to pronominal ones in early linguistic development has hardly been reported in the literature. Bilingual L1 pronominal development studies on this issue are also scarce. This study is the first attempt to trace the developmental route from nominal to pronominal reference to person of a Mandarin-English bilingual first language acquirer (age 1;07 to 4;0). Production rather than comprehension is the focus. Its aims are: • First, the paper aims to investigate the nature of and the route to pronominal person reference by examining the bilingual child’s NP system in the early word learning of his two languages in comparison with monolingual counterparts. This is in syntony with Chiat (1986:14) who underscores the importance of looking at the child’s NP system as a whole when considering pronoun acquisition. • The second goal of this paper is to look at the role of the weaker language and the strategy the child adopts in approaching person expressions in his two languages. In this regard Schlyter (1993: 289) suggests that the two languages of bilingual children are not quite in balance during their development. At least for periods of time, one of the languages is weaker. Owing to the fact that the child may have acquired certain linguistic forms in the stronger language, we can also expect him/her to be influenced by these in the acquisition of the weaker, i.e. the later one, and thus transfer these to a second language. Thus, this study may shed some light on whether there is interdependence or interaction in the domain of pronoun form-function mapping from the stronger language to the weaker one. • The third goal is to contribute to the understanding of the nature and extent of early differentiation in a bilingual child who develops his personal pronoun systems in a pair of typologically distant languages (Mandarin and English) within a language exposure situation different from ‘one person, one language’ principle. In the field of Bilingual First Language Acquisition (BFLA) current orientation appears to have rejected the Fusion Hypothesis (Volterra and Taeschner 1978) and supports the Differentiation Hypothesis or Separate Development Hypothesis (Meisel, 1989, 2001; Genesee, 1989, 1995; De Houwer, 1990, 2002; Lanza, 1997) in morphosyntactic development. De Houwer (2002, in press) points out that the SDH was originally formulated to apply only to children growing up in families following the ‘one person, one language’ principle.]]