The major questions in the research on the simultaneous acquisition of two spoken languages have been 1. whether the child forms one or two linguistic systems, 2. if mixed utterances are a sign of lack of language differentiation and 3. in what way does the language socialization influence the acquisition of the respective languages? Language mixing and the interaction between the two languages of bilingual children have been analyzed in order to answer these questions. Children who acquire two spoken languages cannot produce them simultaneously due to anatomical reasons so that language mixing will always occur sequentially. This is not the case for children acquiring a spoken and a signed language which may be articulated both at the same time. The simultaneous production of lexical equivalents can be found both in the children’s output and in the input of the parents. There has been some research dealing with this factor in the bilingual/bimodal acquisition of hearing children of deaf parents acquiring a signed and a spoken language (i. e. Prinz & Prinz 1981; Griffith 1985; Ackermann & Woll 1990; Bogaerde et al. 1994). In the literature I did not find a study of simultaneous acquisition of two signed languages or as in my case study of a hearing child acquiring two signed languages and one spoken language.
In my study I plan to focus on the data of two hearing children (3;5, 1;2) of deaf parents (mother Spanish, father German) who are exposed to Spanish Sign Language and German Sign Language in a German speaking environment. Briefly, I am dealing with two main factors in my research: the acquisition of languages in different modalities and the acquisition of two sign languages. It is the aim of my work to address the following question considering the findings of the research on bilingual spoken language acquisition and the special situation of children acquiring three languages in two modalities:
- How do the children develop grammatical and pragmatic competence in the three languages they are exposed to?