Raising bilingual children: on the simultaneous acquisition of Spanish and Greek as second L1

Abstract

This paper addresses issues on the affinities and divergences presented in the language acquisition process of two Spanish-Greek bilingual children. Although our analysis is limited to two subjects, it is the first time that an empirical (non- strict in statistical terms) study deals with Spanish-Greek bilingualism in children of typical development and tries to identify the possible existence of common patterns in the acquisition process of Spanish in a sociologically majority Greek- speaking context and the acquisition of Greek in a majority Spanish-speaking context, both as second L1. Our research is based on a corpus that comes from the linguistic output of these children and the data is discussed in terms of phonetic, morphological, syntactic and semantic typology, while interesting examples of code-switching and code-mixing are also examined. Data analysis confirms our initial hypothesis which postulates that the linguistic development of our subjects and normative usage deviations as well as the recorded cases of code-switching and/or code-mixing follow similar patterns.