The Bilingual Acquisition of English and Mandarin: Chinese Children in Australia

Bilingual first language acquisition, or the development of two languages from birth, has been one of the most exciting developments in the broad and interdisciplinary field of child language research in recent years. It also underlay the research question that framed my doctoral dissertation, submitted to University of Western Sydney, Australia, in 2004. As the field of bilingual acquisition has made significant advances in recent years, there has been a surge of interest in the acquisition of Chinese languages in bilingual and multilingual contexts. The first scientific commiss ion on child bilingualism in Chinese languages was convened by Annick De Houwer and Yamamoto Masayo in 2002 at the international conference of the International Association for Applied Linguistics, held in Singapore. A second significant international event was held in 2007 in Hamburg, the Sixth International Symposium on Bilingualism, at which Li Wei and I convened the thematic panel on the bilingual and multilingual first language acqu isition of Chinese children. Some of the fruits of this work were published in a special issue of the International Journal of Bilingualism (2010).