this paper attempts to introduce the dimensions of bi/multi-lingualism as a cognitive linguis-tic phenomenon, which can be thought over in sociological, biolinguistic, cultural and psy-cholinguistic perspective. the main research question being asked as how bi/multilingualism is a cognitive phenomenon and what are the bilinguality problems and how do they repre-sents in linguistics? linguist...

Infants learning words in a bilingual language environment face a number of difficulties that may alter the number and kinds of words learned early in life. The research described here investigates several aspects of word learning that may differ between bilinguals and monolinguals. Using a dataset of 353 infants between the ages of 6 months and 7 years old, approximately half of which are bili...

As the field of bilingual acquisition has made significant advances in recent years, there has been a surge of interest in the acquisition of Chinese languages in bilingual and multilingual contexts. This article serves a dual purpose: (1) to discuss some theoretical and methodological issues in bilingual acquisition with special reference to Chinese languages as target languages in bilingual a...

Within the framework of translation knowledge acquisition from WWW news sites, this paper studies issues on the effect of cross-language retrieval of relevant texts in bilingual lexicon acquisition from comparable corpora. We experimentally show that it is quite effective to reduce the candidate bilingual term pairs against which bilingual term correspondences are estimated, in terms of both co...

Although Bilingual First Language Acquisition research has increased considerably over the past few decades, there is still much controversy regarding the rate of development, i.e. the question whether bilinguals lag behind their monolingual peers in various aspects of language. Some studies have found similar rates of development, whereas others have found that bilingual children lag behind th...

This paper proposes a novel framework called bilingual co-training for a largescale, accurate acquisition method for monolingual semantic knowledge. In this framework, we combine the independent processes of monolingual semanticknowledge acquisition for two languages using bilingual resources to boost performance. We apply this framework to largescale hyponymy-relation acquisition from Wikipedi...

We present a pointwise mutual information (PMI) based approach for formalizing paraphrasability and propose a variant of PMI, called mutual information based paraphrase acquisition (MIPA), for paraphrase acquisition. Our paraphrase acquisition method first acquires lexical paraphrase pairs by bilingual pivoting and then reranks them by PMI and distributional similarity. The complementary nature...

Bilingualism is a fascinating area of study with the potential to contribute much to the understanding of language learning, production, comprehension and processing. Nuria Sebastian-Galles’ paper [this issue] provides some interesting evidence on the early speech perception of bilingual language acquisition. I first make some comments on the data she presents before moving on to a somewhat bro...