Once, experts feared that young children exposed to more than one language would suffer “language confusion,” which might delay their speech development. Today, parents often are urged to capitalize on that early knack for acquiring language. Upscale schools market themselves with promises of deep immersion in Spanish — or Mandarin — for everyone, starting in kindergarten or even before.
Yet while many parents recognize the utility of a second language, families bringing up children in non-English-speaking households, or trying to juggle two languages at home, are often desperate for information. And while the study of bilingual development has refuted those early fears about confusion and delay, there aren’t many research-based guidelines about the very early years and the best strategies for producing a happily bilingual child.
But there is more and more research to draw on, reaching back to infancy and even to the womb. As the relatively new science of bilingualism pushes back to the origins of speech and language, scientists are teasing out the earliest differences between brains exposed to one language and brains exposed to two.
Researchers have found ways to analyze infant behavior — where babies turn their gazes, how long they pay attention — to help figure out infant perceptions of sounds and words and languages, of what is familiar and what is unfamiliar to them. Now, analyzing the neurologic activity of babies’ brains as they hear language, and then comparing those early responses with the words that those children learn as they get older, is helping explain not just how the early brain listens to language, but how listening shapes the early brain.
Recently, researchers at the University of Washington used measures of electrical brain responses to compare so-called monolingual infants, from homes in which one language was spoken, to bilingual infants exposed to two languages. Of course, since the subjects of the study, adorable in their infant-size EEG caps, ranged from 6 months to 12 months of age, they weren’t producing many words in any language. Read more.
See: The New York Times
Норвегия
Local time: 14:36
Член ProZ.com c 2002
английский => норвежский
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and still meet great prejudice to bilingualism from professionals (psychologists, speech therapists, teachers).
A friend was advised to "stop speaking Italian" for a while to his 16-month old twins, so that they could get past their "language-delay", and this by a speech therapist in multilingual Toronto.
Fortunatly, I kept my trilingual kids away from professionals, while following the research in this field on my own.
[Edited at 2011-10-11 19:29 GMT]
Local time: 15:36
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As for the bigger kids, my (Hungarian native) brother living in Florida has a 3-yr old boy (born in the US), raised to be Hungarian and being taught some English words o... See more
As for the bigger kids, my (Hungarian native) brother living in Florida has a 3-yr old boy (born in the US), raised to be Hungarian and being taught some English words once he mastered Hungarian and grew older. My nephew soon learned English from his little American friend (and taught him some Hungarian words) and is able to say complex sentences without any language confusion. He clearly distinguishes the two languages and often asks his father: "How do you say this or that in English?"
And then there's the two of us, raised as Hungarian-Romanian bilinguals (mastering both languages as the monolingual educated natives of the respective languages do). I don't remember having any confusion about the two languages even as a kid.
Kids are marvelous
Канада
Local time: 05:36
испанский => английский
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Anyone remember Glenn Doman (Teach Your Baby to Read; Teach Your Baby Maths)? He said a young child will learn as many languages as he or she is constantly exposed to, and cites the case of a boy who spoke and understood 9 languages by the time he was 10, just because he heard them constantly among his family and relatives.
[Edited at 2011-10-12 02:50 GMT]
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