ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses how children become bilingual. It explains about experimental procedures used to ascertain infants’ language capabilities. The chapter also explains about children’s abilities to differentiate between their languages, and the cognitive effects of bilingual language acquisition. It looks at the significance of children’s codeswitching. The chapter discusses a closer look at some of the studies that provide evidence of separate and mostly autonomous language systems in the early phases of bilingual language development. It provides language-use evidence in favor of the Independent Systems Hypothesis and counter to the Mutual Exclusivity Constraint. Fundamentally, children need a compelling reason to acquire more than one language. They must value the role each language plays in their lives, and grasp how each language helps them to achieve specific goals. The first, the Unitary Language Hypothesis, proposed that children initially perceive the input from the two languages as part of a single language system, specifically as a single lexicon.
