Monolingual V Bilingual

By  Mazvita Makwanya

Like me, some of you reading this is probably bilingual or multilingual (speak two or more languages). And also like me you'll know how hard it is to be multilingual. As if learning one language is not hard enough, some infants have to learn two languages or even more from birth because of inter-rational marriages and the now more common relocation of parents amongst other reasons.

As you all must know, bilingualism is not exactly as rare or uncommon as it used to be a few years ago, but what you might not know is how hard it is to acquire or the stages in acquiring it.

Studies suggested that bilingual children acquire and develop language slower than monolingual children. However recent studies argue that the process of simultaneous bilingual acquisition suggests that the two language developments are similar though some linguists still consider bilingualism as a special case of language development.

The most common ways of children learning to speak 2 languages fluently is through simultaneous development or sequential development. Simultaneous development is when the child learns the two languages somewhat equally. In the early stages of this the child may use words from both languages in a single sentence(language mixing) and use word stems of one language and prefixes and suffixes of another language (language blending) (Victoria Fierro Cobas ,MD and Eugenia Chan, MD). The first stage Sequential development is when they use the normal sequence and then obtain the second language after.

Variation among st bilingual children is big just as is the case for monolingual children.
Infant and child bilingual go through some of the same stages of language development as monolingual children and like monolingual babies. The first stage for both types of child is babbling. Children start to babble in what sounds like nonsense when they are about 6 to 7 months of age.  Although some elements of babbling from a multilingual baby may sound like one language and others like another, babbling is not clearly linked to a particular language (Pearson et al., 2010).

Like those that are monolingual, bilingual children will first learn to respond to their own name.  

By the time they are 13 months of age, bilingual children on average understand as many as 250 different words in total, that is, in both their languages combined (De Houwer et al., submitted a).

Bilingual children say their first words between the ages of 8 and 15 months). Bilingual children may start out saying words only in a single language, or in both depending on whether they are simultaneously or sequentially learning the languages. 

At age 20 months the average total number of words spoken by bilingual children for both their languages combined can be as high as 254 (De Houwer et al., submitted b). Hoff et al. (2012) found a somewhat lower number of just over 200 words at age 22 months.  This supports the earlier claim that the language development varies.