Recueil d'articles et études sur les avantages d'une éducation bilingue ou plurilingue précoce.
1 Janvier 2014
BY KATIE, ON OCTOBER 13TH, 2015
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Post from the University of Maryland College of Behavioural and Social Sciences Blog The Solution
Many adults speak more than one language, and often “mix” those languages when speaking to their children, a practice called “code-switching.” An eye-opening study by researchers in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences has found that this “code-switching” has no impact on children’s vocabulary development. The study, “Look at the gato! Code-switching in speech to toddlers” appears in the Journal of Child Language.
Professor Rochelle S. Newman, chair of the department, and then-graduate students Amelie Bail and Giovanna Morini studied 24 parents and 24 children aged 18 to 24 months during a 15-minute play session.
Key Findings:
•Every parent in the study switched languages at least once during a play session with their child; more than 80 percent of parents did so in the middle of a sentence.
•An average of 4 percent of parents’ individual sentences included more than one language.
•The children of parents who switched languages more often than average, or had more mixed-language sentences did not have poorer vocabulary skills.
•The researchers found no indication that the mixing of languages by the parents resulted in poorer vocabulary learning by the children.
“Parents tend to use very short sentences when talking to children this young—yet despite this, they often switched languages in the middle of sentences, saying things like, ‘el otro fishy’ or ‘can I have the beso?’ We were surprised that so many parents would use two languages in the same sentence when speaking to such young children,” Newman said.
The study was conducted in part to address parental concerns.
“A lot of parents worry that using more than one language in the same sentence might cause confusion for a young child. So it is reassuring to know that children whose parents mixed their languages more often didn’t show any poorer vocabulary skills,” Newman said.
BY KATIE, ON OCTOBER 20TH, 2015
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Blog post written by Marco Tamburelli based on an article in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
The Polish language is well known for its broad range of consonant sequences. Among other things, Polish words may begin with consonant sequences that in languages like English are only allowed in word-medial or word-final position. The sequence /pt/, for instance, is found in the middle and at the end of English words such as raptor or apt, but never at the beginning. In Polish, however, we find words such as ptak (meaning ‘bird’), with the sequence /pt/ occurring word-initially. English does have some types of word-initial sequences that are similar to the /p/> type, notably /st/ as in “stain”, /sp/ as in “spin”, and /sk/ as in “skate”, but these are a proper subset of the sequences found in Polish.
In this paper we wanted to investigate whether children who acquire English together with Polish might be at an advantage when it comes to consonant sequences. We reasoned that Polish-speaking children might rely on their knowledge of the phonological “superset” provided by the Polish system to buttress their development of a “subset” system such as the one required by English consonant sequences. To test this hypothesis, we examined the production of consonant clusters in simultaneous Polish–English bilingual children and in language-matched English monolinguals (aged 7;01–8;11) using a nonword repetition task. The “nonwords” were made up of sound sequences that follow English phonotactics but that are not actual English words, in order to control for potential prior learning effects.
Our results showed that the Polish-English bilinguals consistently outperformed the English monolinguals in the production of English-like nonwords beginning with /st/, /sp/, and /sk/. These results indicate that exposure to a language with a broad range of word-initial consonant sequences can accelerate the development of a second language whose consonant sequences are a proper subset of the first. While crosslinguistic influence in bilinguals has been reported numerous times, this is the first time it has been found to positively affect word-initial consonant sequences.
These findings have a number of implications for our understanding of the development of bilingual phonology as well as for competing views of phonological organisation and phonological complexity
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Blog post written by Marco Tamburelli based on an article in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition The Polish language is well known for its broad range of consonant sequences. Among other things ...
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Parents Mixing Languages has No Impact on Children's Vocabulary Development
Post from the University of Maryland College of Behavioural and Social Sciences Blog The Solution Many adults speak more than one language, and often "mix" those languages when speaking to their ...
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