Virginia Müller Gathercole is a Professor at the School of Psychology at he the University of Wales Bangor. She is a specialist in bilingualisme in very young children. Her main research in language acquisition was for monolinguals but she also studied some bilinguals (Spanish/English in Miami and Welsh/English).

She came to investigate the following question: Is the language acquisition similar or different between the monolinguals and the bilinguals?

The language is a system that has many components:

1. Sounds – phonetics
2. Grouping of sounds. The grouping is done differently amongst the languages – phonology
3. Minimal unit of meaning – morphology
4. Longer unit of meaning – syntax
5. semantics

The 5 steps above are an abstract way of splitting the language system. The language allows knowledge of the world – cognition, and has social settings. A child learns a language by figuring out the language system and the acquisition follows 5 principles:

Principle 1:

Acquisition piece by piece: The child learns a word within a specific context. For example, when he sees a vehicle through the window, he may say “car”. However, when he sees the same vehicle while in the street, he may not say “car”.

Principle 2:

The acquisition is in a context before abstracting common elements and applying them to other context or words. He learns the verbs “talked”, “walked”, “loved” and later he realises that he can make “watched”