ABSTRACT
The chapter suggests that privileged bilingual children whose parents create experiences for them in which they hear and use language appropriate for different contexts and different uses have a richer access to the language. In bilingual communities, minority children have limited access to standard monolingual dialects and registers. The chapter uses the term translation/interpretation to refer to both and interpretation to refer exclusively to oral transmission. It centers on the notion of register and on the functional differentiation of languages as well as on the effect of such differentiation on children who grow up in immigrant communities. The chapter shows some researchers have argued that much of the research on the cognitive advantages of bilingualism is also methodologically flawed and that it has left many important questions unanswered. The class-based language differences, it conjecture that the linguistic repertoires of most ordinary Mexicans who emigrate to the United States are generally made up of mid to low registers of Spanish.
