Introduction: data-driven insights from trilingual children in the making

This special issue arose from a symposium that I organised on ‘Multilingualism as a Norm: Insights from trilingual case studies around the world’ for the XIth International Congress for the Study of Child Language (IASCL) in Edinburgh in 2008. The papers here are nevertheless either completely different from (Barnes and Montanari) or much extended and developed versions of (Kazzazi and Quay) the IASCL presentations. We had the opportunity at IASCL to share common concerns about the dearth of longitudinal naturalistic studies of trilingual infants, the time-consuming nature of our methodology and the merits and demerits of comparing trilingual children to bilingual ones. All of us concluded that studying young trilingual children can give us insights into the boundaries within which language acquisition can unfold, thus contributing to an emerging field of enquiry that extends beyond bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA) studies (see for example, Hoffmann, 2001a, 2001b).

Studies of early trilingualism (defined here as a child's acquisition of three languages before the onset of speech) with specific reference to the earliest stages of language acquisition and spontaneous speech production are generally in short supply, or at least published sources are, as unpublished MA or Ph.D. theses and conference papers do exist. Some positive changes have occurred in recent years since the review by Quay (2001). That review found not only limited available naturalistic studies that examined the speech data of children exposed to three languages regularly before their first words, but also that many studies did not deal systematically with early development due to methodological limitations. Anecdotal descriptions of multilingual children (as in Dewaele, 2000; Küpelikilinç, 2003; Maneva, 2004; Tokuhama-Espinosa, 2008), surveys of language use in trilingual families (such as Barron-Hauwaert, 2003; Braun & Cline, in press; Clyne, 1997; De Houwer, 2004), and preliminary reports (like Chevalier, 2008) do exist that are interesting in their own right as qualitative ethnographic descriptions. However, they do not use extensive natural language data with systematic analyses as their evidence to discuss trilingual development. More recent work within the last decade has started to remedy this situation. For example, Barnes (2008), Montanari (2009a, 2009b, 2010) and Quay (2002, 2003, 2004, 2008) do deal with early trilingualism in the first three years, while others (such as Edwards & Dewaele, 2007; Hoffmann & Stavans, 2007; Stavans & Muchnik, 2008; Stavans & Swisher, 2006) have explored code-switching and code-mixing in trilingual children mostly after age three and up to about age 10. Barnes (2006) and Cruz-Ferreira (2006) are book-length contributions on trilingualism that explore more specific aspects of one of the three languages (English interrogatives for Barnes, and Portuguese phonology, prosody and lexicon for Cruz-Ferreira who deals with later trilingualism as her three children started out as Swedish-Portuguese bilinguals with the additional language, English, added around age three or four). Another recent book, by Wang (2008), is a parents' guide to raising trilingual children from birth that contains advice, anecdotes and personal accounts with some speech examples provided from 11 years of observations. While this is also a valuable contribution to the field, it does not approach the discussion of trilingual acquisition from the systematic analyses of early child language data.

The case studies of early trilingualism in this special issue are from data collected from the Basque Country, Germany, Japan and the USA. The children who have been studied range from ages one to four. In three of the papers, the children have been exposed to two languages in the home, following more or less the one-parent-one language approach, and to a third language outside the home. In the fourth paper by Kazzazi, the mother, a simultaneous bilingual herself, provides two language sources for her children. Data from typologically distinct languages such as Basque, Chinese, English, Farsi, German, Japanese, Spanish and Tagalog are analysed in various combinations in social interactions within the home and daycare contexts. The case studies are interesting as a whole because they show clearly that unlike for bilinguals, the trilingual children cannot be balanced or equal in their language use. There is always a dominant language and weaker languages that come into question.

This special issue provides for the first time in one volume the state of the art in early trilingual acquisition. The four papers bring together naturalistic data with diverse languages and perspectives to illustrate and to address issues of input, dominance, cross-linguistic and cross-cultural influences, language differentiation and language choice. All the papers identify the specific characteristics that distinguish early trilingualism from BFLA and monolingual contexts.

The first paper by Montanari explores whether trilingual exposure had any consequence on phonological accuracy in a trilingual toddler's three languages around age 1;10 (year;month). The second paper by Quay examines the discourse patterns of two children between ages 1;1 and 2;4 at their respective daycare centres and the role of caregivers and peer socialisation in promoting the learning of a third language outside the home. The third paper by Barnes investigates the relationship between maternal discourse style and a trilingual child's production (between ages 2;9 and 3;4) of a language whose input is severely limited, coming only from one parent in the home setting. The final paper by Kazzazi presents data from a wider age range from 1;5 to 4;0 and deals with the issue of dominance from the perspective of cross-linguistic influences, proposing that minority rather than majority influence may occur despite different proficiency levels in a trilingual child (with some comparative data from an older sibling).

To different degrees, all four papers demonstrate that the trilingual setting (rather than a bilingual one) provides more specific insights into what multilingual children are doing in terms of:

•	having heightened awareness of linguistic properties (phonological in Montanari's case) in all languages, despite better performance in stronger languages;
•	achieving language dominance in a societal language (at the daycare centre in Quay), despite consistent and regular input from birth at home from two other languages;
•	mastering a maternal language (in Barnes), despite limited input in a home setting; and
•	demonstrating conceptual dominance where a lesser dominant language can influence covertly the syntactic constructions of two other languages (in Kazzazi), despite the fact that those two other languages are more typologically similar and that one of them is the child's strongest language.

A preference for iconicity and transparency in multilingual development appears in the papers by Kazzazi and by Quay. In the former, the tendency is apparent in how cross-linguistic influence is manifested in modification structures and light verb constructions. In the latter, iconicity and transparency appear in the form of onomatopoeic and gesture-supported utterances in the daycare centre that encourage language dominance in the societal language. Thus, these two papers approach a similar issue from different directions and show the myriad of insights that can be obtained from early trilingual studies. The four papers suggest that it is not just the amount of input or usage that determines the different degrees of proficiency in the three languages to which young children are exposed. Language-internal properties – whether to do with having more success in reproducing constriction degree in languages with a larger variety of fricatives (Montanari), or having one language with more iconic and more transparent features than the others (Kazzazi and Quay) – serve to benefit language acquisition and development. The mother–child bond (in Barnes) and the quality of input (Barnes, Kazzazi and Quay) also contribute to successful language acquisition regardless of input amount or frequency. This special issue shows that trilingual children need to be considered as speakers in their own right. Data from ‘trilingual children in the making’ can have wide-ranging implications that can help us to understand not only how early trilingualism is similar or different from monolingual and bilingual development, but also about the language acquisition process in general.

Suzanne Quay

International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan

Email: [e-mail]

Acknowledgements

I am greatly indebted to Jasone Cenoz, Jean-Marc Dewaele, Charlotte Hoffmann and Ulrike Jessner for their time and expertise in the reviewing process and for their helpful advice and support for this special issue.