Bilingual children

The past months, I’ve met several bilingual children as I have been to the park with Elvira. Today, I spoke to a Spanish-speaking (as well as Swedish-speaking) father of a girl whose mother speaks Swedish.

What I wanted to know was whether his daughter—18 months old—could distinguish between the languages, so that she would respond in the same language she was addressed in.

He said that children in a bilingual environment develop their speech slower, so that he couldn’t really tell yet. But his feeling was that she can’t tell the difference between the languages yet, although she understands both Spanish and Swedish.

I guess that the recognition of patterns proceeds more slowly because the child is exposed to two different language streams, between which the patterns don’t match. The context is very important, I think, to learn the language. Context and feedback. With two different languages, there’s different sounds to recognize for each “unique” context.

I hope to be able to ask a French-speaking father I met a week or so ago, whose son—20 months old—seemed to be able to tell which language he was addressed in. Although he wasn’t capable to form sentences, he used Swedish words when he talked to me and my daughter, but otherwise spoke French with his father.

There’s a huge difference between using single words and being able to form even simple sentences. Elvira doesn’t do that yet, and I’d guess that this comes even later for bilingual children—unless it is so that the higher complexity early on in the language acquisition process prepares the children for the next step: the ability to form sentences (which obviously requires a much more deep sense of language).