Reconsidering Early Bilingualism

A Corpus-Based Study of Polish Migrant Children in the United Kingdom

This book investigates the language of Polish-English bilingual children raised in the United Kingdom and their Polish monolingual counterparts. It exemplifies the lexico-grammatical knowledge of both groups and uses corpus-based grammatical inference in order to establish the source of the impediment of the minority language of the bilingual group. The author applies the methodology of corpus linguistics and narrative analysis to study the language of young bilinguals. He presupposes the caveat that a child-type competence exists and can be contrasted with an adult-type competence. He uses a variety of corpus frequency measures to compare the specific stylometric features of bilingual child narratives and their monolingual counterparts. The book focuses on how bilingual and monolingual language differs in areas such as the lexicon, morphosyntax, and semantics.