Natalia Gagarina

Developmental profiles of bilingual language acquisition: From first words to early literacy

Developmental profiles of typical bilingual language acquisition as opposed to (monolingual) language acquisition profiles reported decades ago (Brown 1973, Ingram 1989, Xanthos 2011) are characterized by higher heterogeneity of path and timing. Diverse environmental contexts as well as internal and external factors create multiple and complex effects, which calibrate these profiles. In the talk, I will try to answer the question How do various factors impact developmental profiles of bilingual language acquisition from first words to early literacy. For lexicon and grammar, I will summarize findings from several (longitudinal) large-scale studies addressing both languages of bilingual speakers with L2 German and several L1s. For spoken discourse, I will ground the talk in the multidimensional theory of narrative organization and report findings from various studies on the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives. The talk will contribute to the theoretical debates on bilingual language acquisition and highlight the notion of a developmental profile and its building blocks.