Review: Silva-Corvalán, Carmen. (2014). Bilingual language acquisition: Spanish and English in the first six years. New York, New York: Cambridge University Press

Abstract

Carmen Silva-Corvalán’s Bilingual language acquisition: Spanish and English in the first six years explores the linguistic formation of her two grandsons from ages 0 to 6. This review discusses Silva-Corvalán’s main findings and the issues related to the amount of exposure and the use of two languages in various linguistic domains in early bilingual acquisition. It also highlights the merits of this extensive and unique research project while at the same time pinpoints some methodological challenges faced by longitudinal studies such as this one.

Keywords

• bilingual acquisition
• heritage speakers
• cross-linguistic interaction
• language contact