LANGUAGE DIFFERENTIATION IN BILINGUAL-CHILDREN - THE DEVELOPMENT OF GRAMMATICAL AND PRAGMATIC COMPETENCE

The question whether young bilinguals are able to differentiate their two linguistic systems from early on is a central issue in research on bilingual first-language acquisition. The occurrence of language mixi ng in the speech of bilingual children has often been interpreted as e vidence for a lack of language differentiation. Stressing the need to examine developing grammatical and pragmatic competence separately, th e present paper investigates formal as well as functional aspects of e arly language mixing in three bilingual children (German/French). The hypothesis that early mixing is due to the fusion of two grammatical s ystems is not corroborated in the data. It is shown that language mixi ng can largely be accounted for in terms of developing pragmatic compe tence. On the other hand, the separate development of early word order in both languages suggests early differentiation of two grammatical s ystems.