Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject Speech Science /
Linguistics, grade: 2,7, University of Bayreuth, language: English,
abstract: In today's era, society becomes more and more globalized, with
the increase of languages in contact. As a result, more and more people
get in touch with, learn and use new languages whether for private or
occupational reasons. Therefore, the interest in studying people who use
two or more languages in an equal manner has greatly increased. These
people are called Bi- or Multilinguals. Due to the described development
of society, the number of children growing up in multilingual
communities and bilingual families is also increasing. Children achieve
languages remarkable quickly and it is even more remarkable when they
learn two languages simultaneously from the very beginning of their
life. The central point of interest for this paper is different
theoretical approaches to the development of BFLA by children. Since the
topic is studied for centuries, this paper has, of course, no claim for
completeness. Thus the focus will be on Annick DeHouvwer's work to
Bilingual first language acquisition. In Chapter 2 the mentioned work by
DeHouvwer is introduced and explained on the basis of terminological
definition. The following points specifie the importance of the
environment for Bilingual First Language Acquisition before an overview
of the major linguistic developments is made. The focus of the third
chapter is on three theories that aim at explaining the complex matter
of Bilingual First Language Acquisition process. After that, these
theories are compared with one another under several points of view.
Subsequently, one of the named theories is applied on the introduced
work of Annick DeHouvwer to show that it can certainly be applied.
