#simultaneous bilingualism

[ritarosenback]

Q&A: How to help a small bilingual child with the community language?

Q&A: How to help a small bilingual child with the majority language?

  Question

Hi!

I am worried about my daughter who is three and a half years old. She was born in Sweden, but I raise her by myself and we speak only Dutch at our home. Her Dutch is fluent, and she has been very talkative for a long time, she speaks in long fluent sentences for about a year and she can reason, joke, compare, and narrate in Dutch.

She spends four days a week in daycare, and all…

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[raisingbilingualkids]

In the first stage [of language acquisition] the child has one lexical system which includes words from both languages . . . in this stage the language development of the bilingual child seems to be like the language development of the monolingual child. . . . In the second stage, the child distinguishes two different lexicons, but applies the same syntactic rules to both languages. In the third stage the child speaks two languages differentiated both in lexicon and syntax . . .

Volterra, V. & Taeschner, T. (1978). The acquisition and development of language by bilingual children. Journal of Child Language 5, 311-26.