Hrvatsko-talijanska dvojezičnost : studija slučaja

In this thesis, we focused on the subject of bilingualism from a theoretical point of view, adding a case study to it as a part of research. Choosing from numerous approaches to bilingualism, we had finally opted for the neurolinguistic one, therefore the first four chapters, ie. the theoretical part of this thesis, deal with some of the key topics concerning neurolinguistics in general. We have discussed the models of bilingual language representation and processing, starting with Weinreich's and Ervin and Osgood's models and on to some more recent ones, like Kroll and Stewart's or De Groot's. We have highlighted the importance of different types of memory, namely the procedural and declarative memory, and their role in language acquistion and language production, which is an inevitable topic if we are to get a detailed view into language organization in brain. We have also taken a closer look at aphasia as one of the key resources of information not only for bilinguals but for monolinguals as well. The main focus was on different recovery patterns, which has proved to be instrumental in explaining the various neural mechanisms participating in language processing. In the last chapter of the theoretical part we have compared monolingual and bilingual children. We have also briefly discussed the nature of simultaneous bilingual acquistion from an early age. For the purpose of this thesis, a short case study had been done. The case study involved two preschool italian-croatian bilingual children as participants. In a short introduction we described and presented the participants' biographical data and language history. After recording and transcribing their spontaneous speech, we formed a corpus, which was later analysed at the morpho-syntactic level. As the corpus contained a lot of examples of language interference, we included those examples in our analysis as well. The aim of our analysis was to examine the most frequently occurred types of errors in participants' speech all together and then to compare the individual errors. Within each type of error examples from the corpus were added to support it. The results obtained from the analysis were later shown in diagrams with added explanations