More information continues to come out about the challenges and benefits of young children learning two or more languages simultaneously. Studies in recent years have largely focused on how early bilingualism or multilingualism affects learning in other areas, as well as the effect on a child’s vocabulary both short-term as well as long-term.
A recent study in Canada looked at the specific issue of language mixing — borrowing words from one language while speaking in another, often resulting in individual sentences with two languages. Children who were raised bilingual from birth were found, as toddlers, to have slightly smaller vocabularies as a result of their parents engaging in language mixing while communicating with them or teaching them new words.
There were a few reasons for mixing languages thus which many parents cited, such as the nonexistence of an exact translation for a particular word, not remembering the equivalent of a word in the language they are using, or difficulty with pronunciation. It was also noted in the study that parents will often mix languages when teaching new words, so their child could learn the word in both languages at the same time.
Yet while the study pointed to resulting vocabularies that were smaller in the short term, the researchers noted that it is likely that a bilingual child’s vocabulary would expand at a faster rate later on. The short-term challenge of categorizing and distinguishing between two different languages when they were so mixed would eventually be counterbalanced by the learner’s increased ability to compensate for such challenges in reasoning and other cognitive skills. These skills include, for example, an increased ability to switch between strategies as well as the ability to learn two new rules at the same time.
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