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A Parents Guide: Coping With The Challenges Of Colic
Colic is a common problem in infants and an even more frustrating condition for parents to deal with. Approximately 10 to 30% of all infants born have colic. If an infant is going to experience colic in its life, it will typically appear within the...
Baby Strollers - Consider Your Budget
Since you got the news, you have begun gather the things your new bundle of joy will be
needing. Decisions for your first baby may seem overwhelming at first. The type of
stroller you will use for your baby is one of the biggest decisions you...
Buying Gently Used Baby Clothing
Remember that adorable outfit you bought for your newborn - the one that cost you nearly $40, and got worn three times before it no longer fit? For such tiny things, baby clothing is expensive - and as fast as babies grow, they seldom see much wear....
Mom Starts Home Business Teaching Parents To Sign to Their Hearing Babies
You've just had this beautiful baby. And then it happens…they cry, they fuss and you have no idea what it is they want. What's worse is that for the next 13 to 15 months you're going to have little clue why this new beautiful bundle of joy...
Overextended Infants
Brainy Baby. Bilingual Baby. Baby Babble Speech Development. Baby Bumblebee Smart Baby Series. So Smart. And let’s not forget Baby Einstein. Not familiar with all of these? Neither was I until curiosity drove me to look into the vast array of...
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Small Children, Languages and Myths
Our children are growing up bilingual in the French part of Canada – Québec. “That’s fine”, says everyone. “Even though they’ll probably start speaking later because they’re learning two languages at once, they’ll catch up.”
Well actually, this well-entrenched idea that bilingual children are slower to acquire language, is actually a myth!
We were surprised and delighted to learn that research is finding that bilingual children do NOT acquire language later than monolingual children. Our first child participated in a language study on babies carried out at McGill University of Montréal, Québec, Canada. There it was explained to us that research is finding that the difference in language acquisition of one child compared to another is very large. Some children speak sooner, some speak later. And the range of language acquisition of bilingual children is just as large as the range for monolingual children, statistically speaking.
Although these research results are relatively recent, I was able to find an article on the internet about it, written by Professor Fred Genesee of McGill University at http://www.earlychildhood.com/Articles/index.cfm?FuseAction=Article&A=38, confirming what we had been told verbally. In addition, instead of seeing bilingualism as the minority exception to the rule, Professor Genesee suggests that there many be as many children growing up bilingually as there are growing up monolingually.
So rest assured that the myths are wrong and the following are true:
- Bilingual children do NOT have delayed language acquisition.
- Learning more than one language at a time is NOT difficult for small children.
- Bilingual children DO master both languages just as well as one.
More and more parents are convinced of the benefits of exposing their small children to foreign languages. This has resulted in the recent explosion of videos, books, music and computer software aimed at babies and preschoolers, that expose them to
another language. For example, free computer games on the http://www.kiddiesgames.com website allow babies and preschoolers from an English-speaking environment to learn and practice French and Spanish.
The most obvious benefit, and one that is confirmed by research, is that exposing infants to a foreign language can help them master that foreign language later on. In the well-documented but very accessible book on baby brain development “What’s Going On In There?”, the author Lise Eliot explains that babies are born being able to hear the sounds of every language in the world. However, this ability is subject to the “use it or lose it” phenomenon. If the baby is not exposed to foreign sounds, she will lose the ability to distinguish those sounds. For example, on page 368, she reports:
«Infants’ ability to discriminate foreign speech sounds begins to wane as early as six months of age. By this age, English-learning babies have already lost some of their ability, still present at four months, to discriminate certain German or Swedish vowels. Foreign vowels are the first sort of phoneme to go. Then, by ten or twelve months, out goes the ability to discriminate foreign consonants, like /r/’s and /l/’s for Japanese babies or Hindi consonants for English-learning infants.»
Another benefit of exposing children to another language that is starting to be recognized, is that of increasing their proficiency in their primary language. It may be that the brain exercise of sorting out multiple languages gives that brain a deeper proficiency in language and grammar overall.
So the next time your infant has the opportunity to be exposed to a foreign language in a suitably fun setting (which is how all activities should be presented to infants, isn’t it?), then jump at the chance!
About the Author
The author of this article, Emma Rath, produces free online and purchasable download baby and preschooler software, available at http://www.kiddiesgames.com.
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