Yip Virginia, and Stephen Matthews. The Bilingual Child: Early Development and Language Contact. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.
In this book, Yip and Matthews present their own perspectives on bilingual youth after observing and participating in their own children’s bilingual experience. The book focuses on the bilingual development in children who grow up within bilingual and multilingual communities. They look into how languages are processed, and the effects that understanding multiple languages have on children. The authors use many research tools such as graphs and data sets to help convey how each bilingual child's background is different. The children studied are shown to develop quite differently from monolingual children. The preface of this book talks about how childhood bilingualism develops naturally in response to the two languages in the children’s environment. I thought the description covered the main topics of the book, which in my opinion, was to show how children develop and grow when they are exposed to two different languages as they grow up.
In this book, Yip and Matthews present their own perspectives on bilingual youth after observing and participating in their own children’s bilingual experience. The book focuses on the bilingual development in children who grow up within bilingual and multilingual communities. They look into how languages are processed, and the effects that understanding multiple languages have on children. The authors use many research tools such as graphs and data sets to help convey how each bilingual child's background is different. The children studied are shown to develop quite differently from monolingual children. The preface of this book talks about how childhood bilingualism develops naturally in response to the two languages in the children’s environment. I thought the description covered the main topics of the book, which in my opinion, was to show how children develop and grow when they are exposed to two different languages as they grow up.