bilingual development

[Kim]

Dear all,

I'm delighted to be a part of this group, especially as my past
research has been in second language acquisition by adult learners of
English. Since coming to Macau (near Hong Kong) and working in
linguistics rather than TESL/TEFL, I am moving into trying to research
first language acquisition and semantic development (using signs)
within a second language. I'm only beginning and am feeling my way
around, so would appreciate any suggestions as to resources that might
be available, other studies done, and so on. In my case, I will
likely try to study whether learning selected signs and the English
words can help to develop or retain new vocabulary when learning
Mandarin Chinese. But I am only starting out.

All help, suggestions re: methodology, and ideas re: what journals I
should be reading are more than welcome. I'd also love to have a
research partner... Perhaps grant funding could be found if we work
internationally?

Thanks for setting this up Claire.

Kim Hughes Wilhelm
Associate Professor
Linguistics/English
University of Macau

[Claire Vallotton]

Kim,

I am excited that you are interested in the intersection of bilingualism and signing. I have long thought that symbolic gestures/infant signs could create a bridge between languages for children growing up in dual language environments. I observed this anecdotally at the laboratory school where I did my initial work on gesturing. And the work of Susan Goldin-Meadow and colleagues showing that gestures help with other kinds of learning (memory for narratives, solving math problems) is a natural lead-in to the idea that gestures may help with language learning as well. I would theorize that gestures should be even more helpful in language learning - since gestures tend to be concretized symbols (Werner & Kaplan, 1975).

Someone just forwarded me this newspaper article about a teacher in Toronto who is using gestures to help her students learn French as a second language.

http://home.mabin.com/~ianhawkins/nationalpost.html

There is research on bilingual children (learning two languages as first languages) showing that their vocabulary development is slowed compared to monolingual children (see reference below). I am very interested in conducting an infant signing intervention study with infants growing up in a bilingual environment to see whether language does help children learn vocabulary in both languages. I think it could be a very fundable project and I'd be happy to talk about the idea of some collaborative work.

Here's that reference:

Oller, D.K., Pearson, B.Z., & Cobo-Lewis, A.B., (2007). P rofile effects in early bilingual language and literacy. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 191-230.

~Claire