Hey! I read the post on child speach and was curious if you knew - I teach a lot of multilingual kids and Dutch kids simultaniously. I often notice that the multilingual kids have similar differences in their speach patterns (i.e. saying "the teacher has got a nice shirt" instead of "you have got a nice shirt" while directly talking to me) as well as mixing up syntax ("this is hard" instead of "this is difficult" - the first one is not a Dutch way to say it). Do you know if it takes multilingual
kids longer to master a first language? And do you have any tips on how to deal with Dutch kids commenting on their speach? Should I tell them the right way to say something or just go along with it? Cheers!
Hey! These are both great questions and I’ll try my best to answer them but in reality - bilingual children’s speech is still, in large, a mystery to researchers.
We WANT to know a lot about how kids who learn two or three languages simultaneously sort them in their brain... but the thing is, often things are language-specific, or kid-specific and it’s hard to find control groups, so it’s something that’s been baffling linguists for a long time.
In general, the answer to your question is kinda yes. Bilingually-exposed kids will have a different development style. The important thing to remember is that every child is unique. Sometimes, children who learn two languages will start speaking slightly later than their monolingual counterparts. However, this is not a huge difference in linguistic development overall. By the time they enter grade school (elementary school?) they will usually have approximately the same language development stage as their peers and it will be unaffected. HOWEVER. If the child in question was raised at home by relatives and parents who speak their first language (let’s call it L1) and only hear their second language (L2) when briefly going outside for errands or to play in the park, their L2 development might be on a slight backburner. So, naturally, when they enter a 100% L2 school system, things will take longer to adjust to.
For example, with what you said about “this is hard” instead of “this is difficult” my greatest guess would be - their parents or caretakers or grandmothers, who are adults and use primarily L1 (their home language). When they learned L2 (maybe the language of the country of residence?), it was later in life, and it is their truly second, foreign language. In an adults’ case, they will develop a large vocabulary of their L2. But their primary syntax, in their brain, will usually be L1 syntax. They’ll insert L2 words into L1 syntax and end up saying things which are technically “incorrect” but make sense when you look at the origin of this phrase. To their peers who also use L1 syntax, this sentence makes sense and is understood in conversation, and it ends up being a used phrase. Their child may hear it and repeat it automatically - because they understand it, and they’ve come under the impression that it is a useable and reliable choice.
As they grow older (9-12?) they will further solidify which combinations are technically ‘unacceptable’ and which aren’t, but this takes time and, unfortunately, several mistakes until they realize people consider it ‘incorrect’.
The post I reblogged also talked about this but - kids who learn language will usually learn the rules first - and the exceptions later. English has a rule, for example: past-tense verbs get “-ed” ending. They learn this in a snap, and over-apply it. Everything is “-ed”. “Goed.” “Sleeped.” “Eated.” This is not a bad thing! This is efficiency at its finest. In a perfect world, the languages would all have single rules that applied to words across the board. But English has exceptions which are drilled into common use by society - so the children eventually also learn common-use exceptions and include them with the rest of the language knowledge.
Same thing with two languages. What the kids are doing is trying to create a pidgin language - a breed of the two they know - which is ideally more efficient on both ends. They’ll fuse sentence structures and common phrases together to create a new breed of sentence which makes perfect sense - if you also know those two languages. The problem is that many people don’t and hear this as only a ‘mistake’.
Now, is it a mistake? Well, in school, it will be counted as one.
The approach I usually take to mistakes - as an ESL teacher to a bunch of Japanese students learning English - is to echo-correct. Which means that if they are talking to me, actively delivering information, I will never interrupt them or say “hey, that’s wrong”. Instead I will sometimes echo what they said back to me - in a correct manner. So it goes something like
Student: I like strawberry. And he like watermelon.
Me: You like strawberries? I see! And he likes watermelons. Ok!
I don’t try to make it overt - I’ll just casually expose them to the correct version and sandwich it into something that sounds like communication through repetition. They’ll sometimes realize they are being passively corrected, because they recognize the correct version when they hear it - and, again, echo it back to me, for example: “...likes watermelons.”
Sometimes they won’t. But most of the time, this is the most non-intrusive way to correct stuff. It’s just exposure. The ONLY thing that fixes these errors is exposure to the more correct version. They will pick it up eventually - but you have to give them lots of correct input to grow the reaction from.
And finally - for the other kids... I don’t know what age level they are. But if you can, maybe even have a talk about it? “Today, let’s talk about languages. How many languages do you speak? Can you speak more than one? Do you know a few words in another language? Is it fun? Is it difficult?” and etc. Facilitate a conversation and stress that those kids that make mistakes AREN’T making them because they’re lazy or incompetent. Draw a picture of a brain on the board, and fill one part with one color, and then another part with another. Explain that two languages take up more room, and it sometimes gets tough to say everything perfectly. But again - perfection isn’t the goal. Communication is. If the mistakes aren’t impeding communication, there’s nothing wrong with them. If your students want to make fun of their peers’ learning mistakes, take a day to teach them their multilingual friends’ language. They will quickly realize that mistakes are an inevitable part of it.
Disclaimer: Aside from being a linguist, I’m not an expert. This is all from personal experience, being bilingual myself, teaching kids for 3 years and being around tons of bilingually-brought-up children.
