THE LEARNING OF ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE EMERGENT BILINGUAL REPRESENTATIONAL SYSTEMS

A developmental theory of bilingualism was advanced for children acquiring English for the first time at school in developing countries. It was argued that there would be a separation of an English representational (meaning) system from the mother-tongue representational system following greater competence in English. Degree of separation of representational systems for three groups of children was measured by two indices derived from word association data. The theory received support on one index but was not supported on the other index. It was concluded that theories that postulate separate representational systems for adult competent bilinguals more adequately account for the findings of this study.