Self–interpreting by bilingual children
Self–interpreting by bilingual children

Summary/Abstract: This paper aims at describing self–interpreting as a specific skill of simultaneous bilingual children to interpret their own utterances from one language into the other. There are very few works on childhood bilingualism whose authors pay attention to the phenomenon (see Dodson 1984; Saunders 1988; Malakoff – Hakuta 1991/2000; Gergely 1997). The data for the present paper are taken from tape–recorded and video–recorded speech of three boys, who acquired Russian and English from their parents according to the principle “one parent – one language”. Self–interpreting positively influences the development of the child’s bilingualism, while the study of this phenomenon helps to reveal many aspects of childhood bilingualism: the difference in the vocabulary and semantic development in two languages; the difference in the acquisition of two grammars; specific features of hesitations; development of pragmatic bilingual competence.

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