Any variation in speech involves making modifications in systematic ways according to a variety of social situations. Choosing appropriately between alternative ways of speaking is therefore an integral part of the communicative competence that adults have that children must acquire. How early this competence is manifested in the speech of young children has not yet been established in the child language literature.
This study investigates language choice as an aspect of communicative competence at a one-word stage of production in a bilingual child exposed from birth to English and Spanish. The data consist of daily diary records and weekly video and audio recordings in two language contexts from the first words to 1;10. Although the child interacted predominantly with her English-speaking grandmother and with her Spanish-speaking father, the fact that the child's bilingual mother was the main interlocutor in a few sessions, speaking either English or Spanish according to the language context being recorded, made it possible to show the importance of the input at a current moment on the child's language choice.
The main findings contribute to language acquisition theory by contradicting generalizations that have been made. The results show that my subject produced translation equivalents from age 1;0 onwards, which contradicts the generalization in the principle of contrast and in a model of bilingual development that children are not able to acquire more than one form to refer to an object, event or process in the first few months of speech. Since differential distribution of equivalent terms in the two language contexts was established to be statistically significant as early as age 1;8, the generalization within studies of the acquisition of communicative competence that children are not able to use their linguistic resources in contextually sensitive ways before age two has also been effectively challenged.
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