Читать книгу The Mysteries of Bilingualism. Unresolved Issues онлайн

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In this book, we will examine eleven unresolved issues and, based on past and recent research, we will give the best explanation we have for them. There will be four parts, each part containing two or three chapters. In Part I, Bilingual Adults and Children, the first chapter concerns who is bilingual. We will examine how bilinguals and bilingualism have been characterized and how this has changed over time. To help us do so, we will call on surveys, dictionary entries, as well as definitions proposed by language scientists. We will also discuss important characteristics of bilingual people and see how self-report questionnaires deal with them. The second chapter will address the question of how many bilinguals there are. We will examine why it is so difficult to obtain exact figures and will concentrate on a few national censuses that offer sufficient data from which numbers of bilinguals can be estimated. Finally, the third chapter concerns one of the most intriguing phenomena in bilingualism: how do infants who acquire two or more languages simultaneously manage to separate them? Even though their task seems daunting, a number of studies indicate how they start doing so perceptually as well as pragmatically.