Dual Language Development & Disorders

A Handbook on Bilingualism and Second Language Learning

Johanne Paradis, Fred Genesee, Martha Crago

• Publisher: Brookes Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781681254074
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica inclusiva

Part of the Communication and Language Intervention Series

One third of young children living in the United States are dual language learners, and the number of bilingual students is on the rise in countries around the world.* Prepare SLPs and educators to support this growing population with the third edition of this bestselling textbook, developed by three influential experts on bilingual language development and aligned with Head Start guidelines on cultural and linguistic responsiveness.

Updated with the latest research and recommended practices, this book gives a broad audience of future professionals the clear and comprehensive information they need to promote positive outcomes for young dual language learners and make informed decisions about assessment and intervention when a disorder is present. Readers will get up-to-date guidance on a wide range of key topics, including recognizing the typical stages of second language learning, supporting development in both languages, distinguishing a language delay from a disorder, planning culturally appropriate interventions, addressing reading disorders in bilingual children, and more. New and enhanced student-friendly features make this edition even more engaging and practical, and a robust new package of online support materials will help faculty members use the book effectively in their courses.

With the foundational knowledge in this state-of-the-art textbook—also a valuable resource for in-practice SLPs and educators—professionals will be ready to help young dual language learners thrive, both at home and in the classroom.

WHAT'S NEW:

• New chapter on supporting heritage language development in children with immigration backgrounds
• Important updates throughout the book on best practices and recent research findings from the field
• Updated student-friendly features, including learning outcomes at the start of each chapter, tables and figures that illustrate key concepts and research, and Voices from the Field text boxes
• Two downloadable parent questionnaires to help SLPs gather critical information when working with culturally and linguistically diverse children
• New online companion materials: discussion questions and class activities for each chapter, plus a final integrative course project

Get a closer look at what's new!
*Migration Policy Institute (2017)

SECTION II

Understanding Bilingual and Second Language Development

CHAPTER 4

Language Development in Simultaneous Bilingual Children

LEARNING OUTCOMES

The information in this chapter will increase the reader’s knowledge of the following:

• The capacity of very young children to differentiate between two languages in their environment and establish dual language systems from the outset of language acquisition
• The ways in which the two languages of simultaneous bilinguals can interact during development to produce unique phonological and morphosyntactic structures that are part of the typical course of bilingual development
• How the pace of early dual language development of phonology, vocabulary, and morphosyntax compares between the minority and majority languages, and how bilinguals compare with their monolingual peers in their pace of acquiring these languages
• How linguistic complexity and quality and quantity of language input influence the extent to which simultaneous bilinguals can keep pace with their monolingual peers in their development of each language, in the preschool and school years.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter discusses the language development of simultaneous bilingual children—those who acquire two languages from birth or at least before the age of 3 years—from infancy through to the school-age years. James, Bistra, and Gabriela, profiled in Chapter 1, are all simultaneous bilingual children. The contexts in which James, Bistra, and Gabriela are growing up are the most common, but they are not the only routes to simultaneous bilingualism. Some parents expose their children to another language from birth via a full-time caregiver who speaks another language. An example of this is an English-speaking family living in Los Angeles who hires a live-in, Spanish-speaking nanny when their child is an infant (see Chapter 1). If this child’s exposure to Spanish is frequent and sustained throughout the preschool and school-age years, she could be considered a simultaneous bilingual, even though the child’s parents do not speak Spanish. Children of parents who travel or live outside their home country for business or personal reasons might also experience simultaneous bilingual acquisition through child care arrangements. Whatever the route chosen to raise children bilingually, parents often have questions about strategies for doing so (see Box 4.1).

It is important to keep in mind that in this book we propose the distinction between simultaneous bilingualism and second language acquisition to be at 3 years of age, but this distinction is not a clear-cut one. Some of the information on school-age bilingual children in this chapter might be applicable to children who begin to learn an L2 shortly after age 3. Conversely, some of the information in Chapter 6 on second language learning could be applicable to children who begin to learn an additional language at age 2.

The primary goal of this chapter is to provide information about what is typical in the language development of simultaneous bilingual children during the preschool and elementary school years, with an emphasis on the preschool years. Regardless of whether simultaneous bilingual children are destined to become bilingual adults, their parents, educators, speech-language pathologists, and other health practitioners should be aware of the impact of simultaneous dual language exposure on children’s language development in preschool and early school years. In particular, caregivers need to set appropriate expectations for these children’s oral language abilities in order to gauge whether their language development appears to be typical or shows signs of delay or disorder. We often use monolingual children as a reference point in our descriptions, and we highlight the similarities and differences between typically developing bilingual and monolingual children in order to permit better identification of aspects of bilingual development that might diverge in some respects from monolingual development.

This chapter addresses the following questions:

• Do children exposed to two languages from birth learn bilingually at first? That is, do they have one single language system or two separate language systems?
• If bilingual children have two separate language systems, do the languages interact in development? Does this interaction cause bilingual children to show some different patterns from monolingual children?
• Are bilingual children slower to learn language than monolingual children, and if so, how much slower? Do bilingual children show similar rates of development in both of their languages? What factors in the child’s environment account for how quickly or slowly they learn each language?
• Are multilingual children distinct from bilingual children? Is learning three or four languages early too burdensome or confusing for children?

---

BOX 4.1

Voices From the Field

Raising Children Bilingually: Questions From Parents

Dear Dr. Genesee,

We hope you can shed some light on a question about infant bilingualism. My Russian wife and I hope to raise our soon-to-be-adopted 10-week-old infant bilingually. (The infant comes from Georgia, a former Russian republic.) My wife insists on the importance of almost exclusively speaking Russian. I was born and raised in California and have only begun to learn Russian. I would like my wife mostly to speak English to our infant when I am around. My question: will my wife’s speaking Russian almost exclusively increase the chances of our child becoming bilingual? I suspect there are both cognitive and affective factors.

Thank you for any assistance,

A father

Dear Dr. Paradis,

We live in Western Canada, and our son is in a French daycare, where there is very strong encouragement to speak French in the home in order to maintain a French-speaking environment at the daycare. Because of this, we committed to speaking French as much as possible, even though my French is at an intermediate level. However, now that he is 2, I have begun to question whether my French-language abilities have been constraining him, and more importantly, feeling like I cannot fully express myself in my mother tongue to him—which I feel will constrain our language communication and relationship development. I have now decided to speak English, though I recognize the challenges this poses in being a part of a French daycare, and later, school. Perhaps you could suggest some helpful resources that will continue to help me understand what is best for my son in a mixed-language family.

Sincerely,

A mother

Parents often ask us about the best way to raise children bilingually. The strategy that has been documented the most is the one parent–one language strategy, in which each parent speaks his or her first or dominant language exclusively with the child to ensure the child is exposed to both languages consistently (see Chapter 5 for more about this method). In contrast to the one parent–one language strategy, some parents both use more of the minority than the majority language at home on the grounds that children receive exclusively majority language exposure at child care and eventually at school. There is no empirical evidence that one strategy works better than another, but the important factors to consider in raising children bilingually are that children receive sufficient and rich input in both languages and that parents can fully express themselves when speaking with their child. Therefore, parents should choose to speak a language they are fluent in most of the time.

---

Considerations for Monolingual–Bilingual Comparisons

Although there may not be as many differences between bilingual and monolingual language development as one might expect (see Chapter 3), the questions for this chapter involve comparisons. Therefore, before beginning to answer this list of questions, we briefly discuss alternative ways of viewing differences between monolingual and bilingual children. Bilingualism in young children was once thought to put them at an intellectual disadvantage, which concerned educational policy makers (see Chapter 3). Because of this historical attitude, differences between bilingual and monolingual language development are often viewed negatively. Bilingual children have often been considered typically developing only if they appear to be similar to monolingual children; they are considered to have delays or disorders if they show any differences. This kind of attitude results when monolingual children’s development is taken as the norm, even though, as discussed in Chapter 1, childhood bilingualism is most likely as common worldwide as monolingualism. Given how widespread bilingualism in childhood is, one cannot help but acknowledge that the human mind is just as capable of bilingual development as monolingual development, even if there are some differences (see Chapter 3). Any differences between the two groups should not imply that bilingualism has pernicious effects on language development as a whole—or that bilinguals need remediation for these effects. We believe that a more appropriate attitude is that there is more than one path to acquiring language, and that one of these paths is to acquire two languages at a time. Having an understanding of the similarities and dissimilarities between monolingual and bilingual first language acquisition will make it clearer when aspects of a bilingual child’s development truly should be a cause for concern (see Chapter 10).

DIFFERENTIATED LANGUAGE SYSTEMS IN BILINGUAL DEVELOPMENT

When an infant is experiencing input from two languages, the infant is not consciously aware that he is learning two languages. A bilingual child does not demonstrate explicit awareness of being a dual language learner until he is much older—perhaps closer to 3 years of age—by talking directly about it. It is therefore not surprising that researchers have asked whether children exposed to two languages acquire those languages bilingually from the outset. In other words, do they represent the language input they hear around them in their minds as a single or dual language system at first? From the beginning of the 20th century until the early 1990s, researchers tended to support the idea that bilingual children do not acquire language bilingually at first. An influential model of this, the unitary language system hypothesis (see Figure 4.1), was put forth by Volterra and Taeschner (1978). They proposed that bilingual children begin the acquisition process with a single language system that combines the words and the grammatical rules from their dual language input. At the next stage, the words differentiate into two vocabularies/lexicons, but the system of grammatical rules remains the same for both languages. In the final stage, around 3 years of age, the system of grammatical rules becomes differentiated, and the bilingual child can be said to have separate linguistic systems, as bilingual adults do. An alternative view to Volterra and Taeschner’s model is one put forth in Genesee (1989), the dual language system hypothesis (see Figure 4.2), which assumes that children exposed to two languages from birth establish two separate or differentiated linguistic systems from the outset of acquisition. According to this view, children with simultaneous dual language exposure never go through a noticeable period in which their linguistic representations are unified and later separate from one into two systems.

Figure 4.1. Unitary language system in early bilingualism. Young children hear speech in two languages, for example, French and English. Children build one linguistic representation in their minds at first, with vocabulary and grammar from both languages mixed together. The unitary system gradually separates into a dual system by age 3, first for vocabulary and then for grammar.

Figure 4.2. Dual language systems in early bilingualism. Young children hear speech in two languages, for example, French and English. Children build two separate linguistic representations in their minds from the outset of acquisition for vocabulary and grammar. Even speech perception in infancy is organized around two language systems. There is no stage where a unitary system exists.

Both the unitary language system and the dual language system hypotheses refer to the nature of the language representation in a child’s mind, but they make predictions about the child’s language behavior. If young bilingual children initially have a unitary vocabulary and grammar, then one would expect them to frequently mix words and phrases from both languages together, regardless of language context or conversation partners. One might also expect them to use grammar rules from one language with words from another and even blend the rules from both languages together. Furthermore, it is possible that the process of differentiating two language syste...