Bilingual Myths

Language development for infants happens in the first 2 years of life. It starts of slow, for the first 20 weeks the infant will typically make cooing sounds, and whilst cooing they will also make various vowel and consonant sounds. At 6-12 months the infant begins to babble, focuses on the phonemes, rhythm, has an intonation of language spoken in the home, and begins saying single words. 12-20 months they use word-gesture combinations combined with variations in intonation, and uses two-word sentences and they express a vocabulary of 100 to 200 words. Cultures all over the world show that an infant’s language development is the same, some babies speak before the normal language milestone, and some don’t speak till a little later. All babies …show more content…
These myths about bilingual infants come from older research that looked at poorly designed studies and drew the conclusions that early exposure to two languages put children at a disadvantage. Basically they mistook infant’s normal process of language structuring, with them being confused and mixing the words up. This lead to researchers pushing immigrant parents to drop their heritage language, and emphasized using English instead. One of the myths I can actually relate to a tiny bit, is that if the child is raised bilingual then they are more likely to stutter. I had mentioned that it may be caused by genetics, the reason I say that is because I stutter at times, and have noticed my father has the same problem. Since all the past studies were disproven it lead to more research on how exactly babies sort out and separate languages. The studies showed that bilingual babies use qualities such as pitch and duration of sounds to keep two languages separate. It also showed that monolingual infants of 10 to 12 months represent a process of “neural commitment”, which is when the infants’ brain wires itself to understand on language and its sounds. Lastly, just because there are language development differences in monolingual and bilingual infant, it doesn’t mean they start speaking at different times, cannot develop the same speech and cognitive disorders as monolingual children. I am from a bilingual household and started talking around the expected milestone, but my brother did not speak at all, for a long time my mother was afraid that he had autism or some other disorder. The only way he’d say anything is through mumbles and gestures that only I could interpret. But once he entered school he started talking more and more, and had a few speech problems. For example he used to have a lisp and stutter a lot, and now he stutters almost as much as I do, which isn’t often at all (once in a blue