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Volume 2 No.1

October 1996

The Japan Journal of Multilingualism and Multiculturalism

多言語多文化研究

Double Transitions: A Case Study of an Infant Japanese/English Bilingual

Sachiyo Fujita Round

Postgraduate Student

Hitotsubashi University

As part of a longitudinal study of the simultaneous acquisition of English and Japanese by the child of a Japanese mother and English father who employed the one parent, one language strategy, this paper looks at two major transitions that occurred during a 5-month period preceding his second birthday. Just as the child was moving from the one-word to the two-word stage of language production, the family moved from England to Japan. Because English had been his dominant language during the one-word stage, the child had acquired a large number of English nouns. However, he moved to a Japanese-speaking community at the time when he normally would have learned noun inflections in English. His multi-word stage therefore developed along Japanese lines, with acquisition of more verbs and functors. Thus, he began mixing English nouns with Japanese particles and verbs in what appears to be Japanese syntax. This development is analyzed in light of the three stages of bilingual development outlined by Volterra and Taeschner.