![]() So the evidence shows us that bilingual kids might have some slight delays in their language development, but these delays aren’t harmful and the kids usually catch up with their monolingual peers eventually. The stigma associated with non-English languages and with so-called “foreign” accents also extends to children, which means that monolingual teachers and doctors sometimes perceive “problems” in bilingual kids that they don’t notice in monolinguals. In that case, why would there be pressure on parents who have immigrated to Canada to speak English at home? If you think back to previous chapters, it probably has more to do with power and privilege than with children’s development. Some research indicates that the delay is within the normal range of variation for monolingual kids, and some suggests that most bilingual kids catch up to monolingual kids in both their languages by about age ten. There is a lot of variation between children and between language environments. ![]() So it’s true that there’s sometimes a slight delay in bilingual kids’ development in each of their languages, relative to monolingual kids, when measured using the tests that are standardized for monolinguals.īut remember that language acquisition is not a race! Reaching a milestone a few weeks later than other kids needn’t be cause for concern. But that’s only if you compare the one language! If you compare the size of a bilingual child’s vocabulary across both their languages, it’s the same or even bigger than that of a monolingual at the same age (Hoff et al., 2014). Their vocabulary in the one language is a little smaller, and it takes them a little longer to reach the typical milestones in grammatical development (Hoff et al., 2011). In other words, if you measure a bilingual child’s language development in one of their two languages, they might be a little delayed relative to a monolingual child’s development. So it takes a little longer for them to have encountered enough language to build up the mental grammar for each of their two (or more) systems. The child in the bilingual environments gets, say, six hours of Language A and six hours of Language B: they just don’t get the same quantity of either language as the monolingual child does. The child in the monolingual environment gets twelve hours of Language A every day. To make this example simple, let’s say they’re each awake for twelve hours a day, and as long as they’re awake, they’re exposed to language input. Let’s compare the language environments of two hypothetical children. ![]() And on a much smaller scale, an only child who is at home with one adult all day might not get a lot of language input and so might not show much language use until they start going to daycare where they get exposed to lots of language in the environment. As we saw above, deaf children who don’t have access to language input in a vocal language environment can’t develop a mental grammar for that vocal language. The amount of language input plays a role in kids’ rate of acquisition. Remember that children’s mental grammars develop in response to input from the language environment: whatever language is used by the people around them, that’s the language that a child learns. So is it risky for kids to be bilingual? Instead of opinions, let’s look at the evidence. This is also the kind of thinking that leads hearing parents of deaf kids to worry that if their child learns a signed language, it’ll interfere with their acquisition of a spoken language. Even today in Canada it’s not unusual for a teacher or a doctor to advise parents who speak another language that they should speak English at home so their child doesn’t get confused. In Canada and the US, where English has privileged status, it has been common for English-speakers to believe that being bilingual is a disadvantage, or even harmful! Bilingual kids were thought to be less intelligent and at greater risk for developmental delays and so-called “emotional disorders”. And some kids grow up in an environment where all the adults switch between two or three languages. In some families, one adult speaks one language and another adult speaks a different one. Some children have one language in the home environment and another at daycare. It is just as common for children to grow up with more than one language in the environment. There’s a bias in the literature on children’s language acquisition: a lot of it focuses on kids who are acquiring just one language, but monolingual kids are not the norm around the world. 11.9 Growing up bilingual (or multilingual!)
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