Cover not available

In:60 Years of Applied Linguistics: Toward more engaged research
Edited by Grégory Miras, Isabel Colón de Carvajal, Nathalie Blanc and Shona Whyte
[AILA Applied Linguistics Series 22] 2026
► pp. 18–30

Get fulltext
PDF logo with download linkDownload Chapter PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload Chapter EPUB

Chapter 1
Toward diversification of bilingual acquisition research

Insights from heritage bilingualism

ORCiD logo with link | Chinese University of Hong Kong
Open Access logo
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 9 March 2026
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/aals.22.01yip
Abstract
This paper discusses issues of language diversity and inclusion in the context of bilingual language acquisition, with a focus on heritage language development. The lack of diversity and representation in language acquisition research in general and in bilingual acquisition in particular is highlighted. Diversification in our work involves moving from bilingual to trilingual acquisition, and from homeland to heritage contexts in the creation of the Child Heritage Chinese Corpus. Examples are drawn from Chinese-English language pairs in homeland and heritage contexts. A heritage trilingual child’s code-mixed utterances are shown to be more complex than monolingual utterances, providing a novel window into translanguaging in heritage contexts. This suggests that translanguaging enables him to pool his language resources to express more complex content.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.Language diversity and acquisition
  • 2.Bilingual acquisition in a heritage context
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
References (25)
References
Antoniou, K., Grohmann, K. K., Kambanaros, M., & Katsos, N. (2016). The effect of childhood bilectalism and multilingualism on executive control. Cognition 149, 18–30. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blasi, D. E., Henrich, J., Adamou, E., Kemmerer, D., & Majid, A. (2022). Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science. Trends in Cognitive Science, 26(12), 1153–1170. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Deng, X., & Mai, Z. (2024). Input effects and unidirectional transfer in Mandarin–English heritage bilingual children: The case of spatial prepositional zai-phrases. International Journal of Bilingualism, 29(3), 651–666. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Diamond, J. (2013). The world until yesterday: What can we learn from traditional societies? Penguin.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Eberhard, D. M., Simons, G. F., & Fennig, C. D. (eds.). (2025). Ethnologue: Languages of the world (28th ed.). SIL International. [URL]
Evans, N. (2009). Dying words: Endangered languages and what they have to tell us. Wiley-Blackwell. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Garcia, O., & Li, W. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism, and education. Palgrave MacMillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Garraffa, M., Beveridge, M., & Sorace, A. (2015). Linguistic and cognitive skills in Sardinian-Italian bilingual children. Frontiers in Psychology, 6. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kidd, E., & Garcia, R. (2022). How diverse is child language acquisition research? First Language, 42(6), 703–735. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lai, J., Mai, Z., Matthews, S., & Yip, V. (under review). On the developmental relationship between code-mixing and MLU in bilingual children.
Lee, J. H. N., Lai, R. Y. K., Matthews, S., & Yip, V. (2024). Prosodic interaction in Cantonese-English bilingual children’s speech production. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 14(5), 668–707. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lewis, M. Paul. (Ed.). (2009). Ethnologue: Languages of the world (16th ed.). SIL International.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Li, A., & Matthews, S. (2022). Turning the tide: Reversing heritage language attrition and shift in a Chinese American family. Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 50(2), 291–322. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk (3rd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mai, Z., Shang, M., Liu, J., Yan, S., Matthews, S., & Yip, V. (2024). Acquiring Chinese in US, Hong Kong and Beijing: Three new corpora and three verbal structures. Paper presented at the XVIth International Congress for the Study of Child Language (IASCL-2024), July 15–19, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic.
Matthews, S., & Yip, V. (2011). Cantonese: A comprehensive grammar (2nd ed.). Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
National Science Foundation. (2023). Dear colleague letter: Stimulating diversification in language science research (LangDiv). [URL]
Paradis, J. (2022). What can journals do to increase the publication of research on the acquisition of understudied languages? A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022). First Language, 42(6), 794–798. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Polinsky, M., & Scontras, G. (2020). Understanding heritage languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 23(1), 4–20. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rothman, J., Bayram, F., DeLuca, V., Di Pisa, G., Duñabeitia, J. A., Gharibi, K., Hao, J., Kolb, N., Kubota, M., Kupisch, T., Laméris, T., Luque, A., van Osch, B., Soares, S. M. P., Prystauka, Y., Tat, D., Tomić, A., Voits, T., & Wulff, S. (2023). Monolingual comparative normativity in bilingualism research is out of “control”: Arguments and alternatives. Applied Psycholinguistics, 44(3), 316–329. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wang, D. (2019). Multilingualism and translanguaging in Chinese language classrooms. Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wong-Fillmore, L. (1991). When learning a second language means losing the first. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 6(3), 323–346. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Yip, V., Mai, Z., & Matthews, S. (2018). CHILDES for bilingualism. In D. Miller, F. Bayram, J. Rothman, & L. Serratrice (Eds.), Bilingual cognition and language: The state of the science across its subfields (pp. 183–201). John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Yip, V., & Matthews, S. (2007). The bilingual child: Early development and language contact. Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2022). Language diversity and bilingual first language acquisition: A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022). First Language, 42(6), 832–836. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue