Early Bilingualism

Abstract

Abstract This entry describes the major linguistic developments in Bilingual First Language Acquisition (BFLA) and Early Second Language Acquisition (ESLA) in children under the age of 6. Focusing first on linguistic developments, it describes babbling, phonology, word comprehension and production, and morphosyntax. Although developmental patterns are largely predictable as a function of children's ages and bilingual learning settings, there is great interindividual variability. Uneven development where children's languages develop at different rates is typical. In BFLA there is relatively little influence from one language on the other. There is much more of it in ESLA. Bilingual children use utterances with words from a single language but may also say utterances with words from two languages. They are able to fluently switch between these depending on the sociolinguistic context. The entry also discusses some implications of developmental findings. It stresses the importance of maintaining children's home languages for optimal family communication and refutes some commonly held myths that are not of benefit to bilingual children. Educators may become concerned if one of a bilingual child's languages appears to develop too slowly. It is only when bilingual children are developing very slowly in both of their languages that one has to start worrying. Given sufficient time and learning opportunities, and a positive attitude from all involved toward the bilingual language learning experience, children everywhere can become fluent speakers of two languages from early on.