So let’s talk about multitasking. As adults, this isn’t really something we’re
all that good at. That could be even more true about learning languages: learning
even one new language can seem really intimidating. Learning two or more at once just seems
ludicrous to most people. But for babies, those little linguistic geniuses?
They can double up and have room left over for crying and crawling. I’m Moti Lieberman,
and this is the Ling Space.
New parents can get really worried about how their baby will deal with acquiring language
when they’re exposed to more than one at a time. They think, "oh no, my poor
baby, they will get their English and their French all together in
one bin in their head and they'll just get confused! And then all the other kids are going to laugh at them!"
Well, through the early 1980s, that’s what linguists thought, too. There was a lot of
concern about what happened to babies who were learning two different languages at once, which is also
known as simultaneous bilingual first language acquisition.
And as it happens, a very influential paper from the late 1970s
said that those dual-language-wielding babies did exactly that. All the grammar, all the
vocabulary, for both languages would get clumped together in the baby’s mind, and then they would
just have to sort it out later.
Parents still get worried about that, but fortunately, we know way more about bilingualism
than we used to. And it turns out, we have nothing to worry about at all.
These little kids have no trouble telling what words and sentences should
go where, and they build grammars for both languages just fine.
So how can we know that they’re separating out their two languages? Well, we can examine
their production in both languages. A 2000 study looked at 15 French/English bilingual
children between 2 and 4 years old. The researchers wanted to see whether the kids made mistakes
about where they put negation in the sentence. For English, negation comes before the verb, like
in “The Browncoats didn’t win the Battle of Serenity Valley.” But in spoken French,
it comes after the verb. That would be like, “Les Browncoats ont pas gagné la bataille de la Vallée de
la Sérenité.”
Now, if kids have mixed grammars, we should expect to see them sometimes sticking negation after
the verb in English, and before it in French. But even the younger kids in this study know
the right place for negation to go. They already separated out English and French syntax,
so they know where "no" should go.
But that’s just one example. A systematic review from 2005 looked at longitudinal data,
or data collected from one child over a long time,
from 29 different kids. These children were between 1 and 6
years old, and there were a lot of different language pairings in the data: Spanish
and Basque, Latvian and English, French and Swedish, and lots more. Beyond that, the
different research reviewed across those 29 kids was looking at a lot of different
syntactic properties: pronouns, word order, gender, negation, lots of different things.
So the results from this? Across the data sets, for all the children examined,
there was zero evidence of anybody putting their grammars together. They
keep the two languages separate in their heads; there’s a fence, and the grammars
can't jump across.
But we’ve just been talking about syntax so far, and that’s not all there is to language.
Like, what about sounds? Can little kids learn the different phonemes of their two languages?
Okay, so first, we need to remember that we have to be looking at kids after they're a few months
old. Younger babies have the ability to differentiate between any two sounds that are phonemes
in any language in the world. Babies are just awesome that way. But after that, normally,
we lose the ability to tell those sounds apart, and we can only hear the phonemes of our own language.
Well, a study from 2003 looked at babies who were learning both Spanish and Catalan. Catalan
cares about the difference between the two vowels [e] and [ɛ],
but Spanish doesn’t. To Spanish, those are both parts of the same phoneme. So the researchers
tracked down three age groups of babies - 4 month old super awesome babies who can differentiate
between any pair of sounds; 8 month old babies who are somewhat less awesome at
telling the difference between vowels; and 12 month old babies, who are basically locked into
their language’s sound system. And they got babies for each of these ages who only
spoke Spanish or Catalan, and then some simultaneous bilingual kids.
Okay, so: the littlest babies, no matter what language they spoke, could tell apart [e] and [ɛ].
Spanish babies, as they got older, didn't care anymore - to them, [e] and [ɛ]
were the same sound. And Catalan babies always cared - to them, this was always an important,
meaningful differnce. But the bilingual babies? They couldn't tell at 8 months old, but then they
recovered the ability to tell the difference between [e] and [ɛ] by the time they were one. Which
is super interesting - it’s like they thought, mmm, no, nah, maybe not, okay wait, yes, maybe, yes, okay - yes.
And also, it means they’ve nailed the sounds that they need for their language
by the time that they’re 1. That might not be as good as 8 months, but I think we can agree
that’s still pretty fast. And it’s not just vowels - we see similar patterns for
consonants, too, like for French and English bilinguals.
Now, part of the reason that parents get so concerned is that they hear their children mixing their
two languages together, and they're like, oh no, my baby is confused! They're never gonna get
their two languages right! This process is known as code mixing,
and it can happen at any layer of the language, from sounds to words to sentences: a German/English
bilingual kid might say “pfeifting” instead of “whistling”; an English/French bilingual
kid might say “Jayne found a statue of himself,” instead of “a statue”, or “River wants
to close the light,” instead of "turn off the light."
Early research into code mixing assumed that these kids actually were just confused. But then
some other linguists thought… "But bilingual adults do this kind of switching, too." And
the adult research found it’s all conditioned: you switch more or less depending on who you’re
talking to, what you’re talking about, how good you are at both of your languages,
how formal it is you’re being, and other factors too. So it's a variety of social cues, not mashed-up language.
problems. And it turns out, kids are pretty much the same. You see more mixing happening when they’re
in their weaker language, and you see less mixing happening when they’re talking with someone they know only speaks
one of their languages. The fact that they can control it at all though is a sign that they don't have the same grammar
for both languages.
And it’s worth noting again: we’re talking about this stuff at really, really early ages.
All the studies I talked about here? Those are of little kids, learning the two languages together from
the start. So they’re getting them without explicit learning, and without any of the difficulties
that older kids or adults have in learning new languages. And there’s even evidence suggesting
that learning two languages that young makes it easier to learn new languages later in
life. There’s a lot more to say about this, but for now, the message is prefectly clear:
learning multiple languages as a baby or young kid is basically a total win.
So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space for this week, but if your code didn’t get
too mixed, you learned that linguists think bilingual kids have two different grammars
for their two different languages; that we’ve decided that because of a lot of data from
bilingual kids’ speech and perception; and that even though kids do some code mixing,
it doesn’t mean that they’re confused about their different grammars.
The Ling Space is written and produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Élise
Prévost, our production assistant is Georges Coulombe, our music and sound design is by Shane
Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE. We’re down in the comments below, or you
can go over to our website, where we have some extra material on this
topic. Check us out on Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook, and if you want to keep expanding
your own personal Ling Space, please subscribe. And we’ll see you next Wednesday. L’hitraot!