Pro-active attitudes and education strategies in early trilingual acquisition: referential avoidance and parental intervention at the one-word stage

Abstract

This paper studies an input exploitation strategy employed by one trilingual Spanish-Portuguese-Hebrew child—Noam. It is concerned with the acquisition of early vocabulary and meaning. The study adopts a case-study methodology for data collection and analysis within the ‘qualitative research’ paradigm of child language research (Dromi, 1987). It discusses the application of ‘referential avoidance’ by this child, i.e. the excessive use of ‘expressive’ vocabulary instead of names for objects, it is also concerned with 'parental intervention’, a strategy —not unlike 'parentese’ (Snow & Ferguson, 1977; Gallaway & Richards, 1994)— employed by Noam ’s parents to increase the speed of acquisition of referential words. I argue that parental intervention can facilitate the acquisition of names for objects in multilingual children and others. Children exposed to low status minority languages, such as Spanish and Portuguese in Israel, may be unequal to the task of acquiring three lexicons simultaneously.