Bilingual Children have a Two-track Mind

Skott Freedman

Adults learning a foreign language often need flash cards, tapes, and practice, practice, practice. Children, on the other hand, seem to pick up their native language out of thin air.

The learning process is even more remarkable when two languages are involved.

In a recent study examining how bilingual children learn the two different sound systems of languages they are acquiring simultaneously, Ithaca College faculty member Skott Freedman has discovered insights that indicate children can learn two native languages as easily as they can learn one.

"At first glance, the process of learning a language can seem incredibly daunting," said Freedman, an assistant professor of speech language and pathology and audiology.

"Environmental input presented at a fairly rapid rate must be mapped onto detailed representations in the brain. A word's meaning, sounds, and grammatical function all must be extracted from the incoming speech stream. Yet this potentially arduous task is typically executed with little effort by children barely a year old. In fact, studies show that children can learn a word in as little as one exposure."

But how complex is the process when a child grows up learning two languages?

"It has commonly been debated whether a bilingual child has one large set of sounds from both languages or, conversely, two separate sound systems," Freedman said.

"A way of testing this theory is to measure a child's language productions in both languages using some measure of complexity and then comparing the two languages."

Freedman's study measured complexity in terms of the word shape, such as the presence of word-final consonants and consonant clusters.

He also measured the degree to which the children could approximate their languages. For example, if a child said "tar" for the word "star," he or she produced three of four possible sounds, therefore approximating the word with 75 percent accuracy.

"A hypothesis proposed several years ago predicts that, though bilingual children may differ in their productions between languages, they will nevertheless maintain a similar level of overall approximation," Freedman said.

"The hypothesis was confirmed in a study using an English-Hungarian bilingual child, but no study to date has tested the hypothesis in Spanish, the fastest-growing language in the United States."

Freedman's study compared the language productions of five English-Spanish bilingual children during a picture-naming task to the productions of five English-only and five Spanish-only speaking children.

The results confirmed the hypothesis, with some added insights.

"While bilingual children produced more complex forms in Spanish than in English, they nonetheless approximated English and Spanish to the same degree. Perhaps while learning a language, some inner algorithm determines how much one needs to articulate in order to be understood regardless of the different kinds of sounds between languages. Otherwise, children should have been more easily understood in Spanish."

In addition, Freedman found that no production differences emerged between the bilingual children and their monolingual counterparts in English or Spanish, indicating a sufficient amount of independence between a bilingual child's two sound systems.

"Bilingual children manage not only to learn two sets of words at one time and keep these two systems separate, they even keep the two sound systems separate," Freedman said.

"This result makes a case against not exposing children to more than one language at birth because they might be confused or overwhelmed."

The results of Freedman's study were published in the December 2012 issue of the International Journal of Bilingualism.

Diglot Bilingual Books for Children - Dutch English ABC

Diglot Bilingual books for toddlers.


Alison O' Dornan of Diglot Books is on Twitter if you are hunting for new multilingual language resources.

You will be impressed by her books, also by her drive to make excellent products for the bilingual children’s market.

Alison’s concept is simple, produce quality books and products which support language learning in bilingual children.

What makes Diglot different is the attention to detail. There are lots of books which give you the alphabet in English or Dutch, but Diglot produce the only A-Z where the word in both languages is the same, promoting word recognition equally in both languages.

Diglot Books are also stocked in Waterstones, Amsterdam.

Diglot Books also provide Dutch-English A-Z Going Shopping Flash Cards as well as their ever popular Nederlands English ABC.

NB: Unfortunately at this point in time their website is experiencing difficulties and is under maintenance.

Bilingual children outperform their peers - Creativity

Bilingual children outperform children who speak only one language in problem-solving skills and creative thinking, according to new research.

The University of Strathclyde studied primary school pupils who spoke English or Italian – half of whom also spoke Gaelic or Sardinian – and found that bilingual children were significantly more successful in the tasks set for them.

Gaelic-speaking children were, in turn, more successful than the Sardinian speakers.

The differences were linked to the mental alertness required to switch between languages, which could develop skills useful in other types of thinking.

The further advantage for Gaelic-speaking children may have been due to the formal teaching of the language and its extensive literature.

Dr Fraser Lauchlan, an honorary lecturer at the University of Strathclyde's School of Psychological Sciences and Health, led the research which was conducted with colleagues at University of Cagliari in Sardinia.

He said: "Bilingualism is now largely seen as being beneficial to children but there remains a view that it can be confusing, and so potentially detrimental to them.

"Our study has found it can have benefits, not only in language but in arithmetic, problem solving and enabling children to think creatively."

Cognition : A case study of an English-Japanese bilingual with monolingual dyslexia

ScienceDirect - Cognition : A case study of an English-Japanese bilingual with monolingual dyslexia

Here is a very interesting report, the case of AS, a 16 year-old English/Japanese bilingual boy, whose reading/writing difficulties are confined to English only.

AS was born in Japan to a highly literate Australian father and English mother, and goes to a Japanese selective senior high school in Japan. His spoken language at home is English.

AS's reading in logo-graphic Japanese Kanji and syllabic Kana is equivalent to that of Japanese undergraduates or graduates.

In contrast, his performance in various reading and writing tests in English as well as tasks involving phonological processing was very poor, even when compared to his Japanese contemporaries.

Yet he has no problem with letter names or letter sounds, and his phoneme categorisation is well within the normal range of English native speakers.

The data show a clear dissociation between AS's ability to read English and Japanese, and the research study put forward the ‘hypothesis of granularity and transparency'.

Definitions
The Orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language and Phonology is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language.

Study Postulation
It is postulated that any language where orthography-to-phonology mapping is transparent, or even opaque, or any language whose orthographic unit representing sound is coarse (i.e. at a whole character or word level) should not produce a high incidence of developmental phonological dyslexia.