Sunday, June 22, 2008

Buenos días, Grandma



I found a recent CALdiget article from the Center for Applied Linguistics on current research on raising bilingual children. Two points that refute assumptions that many parents and pediatricians hold are that




  • Although many parents believe that bilingualism results in
    language delay, research suggests that monolingual and bilingual
    children meet major language developmental milestones
    at similar times.


  • Despite many parents’ fear that using two languages will result
    in confusion for their children, there is no research evidence
    to support this.
    On the contrary, use of two languages in the
    same conversation has been found to be a sign of mastery of
    both languages.


I found this recent research particularly interesting because I live in a household with newborn twins whose mother is a speech and language pathologist. Although everyone in the household had agreed that it would be beneficial that I speak Spanish to the infants, we did wonder about the "speech delay" issue. My own background is in linguistics and bilingual education, but I hadn't heard about the concept of speech delay until talking with my daughter-in-law. We had both unsuccessfully searched for relevant research previously, but now we have this excellent article with references.



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