Cross-linguistic and cognitive aspects in the acquisition of WH-questions in an Italian-Indonesian bilingual child

This chapter examines language development in a bilingual child growing up with two typologically distinct languages – Italian and Jakarta Indonesian. It presents a case study of unbalanced bilingualism and focuses on the development of WH-forms and concludes that dominance of the loose Indonesian syntactic pattern results in a non-target word order in the construction of early WH-questions in Italian. In conclusion, the chapter identifies cross-linguistic structures in quantitative and qualitative perspectives and hypothesizes theoretical explanations for cross-linguistic dominance and the gradual emergence of correct usage of Italian grammatical structures. In so doing, the study considers how children recognize languages as separate systems and how they gradually develop the cognitive patterns required for competence in separate though practically co-extensive linguistic domains.