On growing up bilingual - and attempting to do the same for my children
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This month I’ve been delving into science behind bilingualism. For those who don’t know me - I’m originally from the Netherlands but I left at the age of six. This means my English now far exceeds my Dutch, but I try my best to speak in Dutch to the kids. Though these days I’m finding it harder as the kids tend to reply back to me in English
When I first moved to the UK from the Netherlands,, I only spoke a handful of words in English. I could say ‘thank you’ and ‘good morning’ and probably a few other phrases. I distinctively remember my first day in kindergarten and not being able to understand a word the teachers and kids were saying. We communicated through play, and it somehow wasn’t at very daunting. A few weeks later I was fluent - such is the malleability of a child's brain that when completely immersed in another language, they pick it up without effort. When I started to learn to read and write, I was not behind. Being exposed to English later than my peers wasn’t a hindrance, but provided some cognitive benefits that you can learn more about below.
While I was only bilingual from the age of six, I’ve been determined to introduce two languages for my children from birth. It’s not easy, Dutch is no longer my dominant language and when we are trying to get ready quickly, or one child is acting up (or well, being a child), my instincts are to speak English. The main benefit of course is that very fact - they can communicate to friends and family when we go to the Netherlands, but I’ve always known there are benefits to the brain too - which I delved into a little more on my most recent post for Bold, an excerpt of it is below:
Like many parents who speak more than one language, I am raising my children to be bilingual. My elder child is fluent in both English and Dutch, and the younger understands Dutch but hesitates to speak it. I often wonder what impact growing up in a bilingual family might have on my kids.
While it was once thought that speaking more than one language to a child could slow the child’s language development, we now understand that doing so has many possible benefits, including earlier development of social skills and perhaps even a delay in the onset of Alzheimer’s disease symptoms.
Enhanced processing in bilingual children
Understanding that language is a code that reflects things from the real world – gaining ‘metalinguistic awareness’ – is a fairly complex cognitive process. Bilingual children develop this awareness earlier than monolingual children simply because they regularly hear the words for concepts and objects in two languages.
My daughter, now six years old, quickly caught onto this even as a toddler, and would translate words like lion and monkey when she realised she knew two words for each animal. Now when I speak Dutch to her in the presence of a non-Dutch-speaking friend, she takes it upon herself to translate. Early on she became aware that most of her friends cannot understand the ‘code’ I speak to her.
This difference in metalinguistic awareness was studied as early as 1986, when researchers asked children questions like “Which word is bigger: caterpillar or train?” The correct answer, of course, is caterpillar, but many young children say that the word “train” is bigger, simply because a train is physically larger than a caterpillar. “Bilingual children home in on the fact that words are separate from their reference, and they will give the correct answer at an earlier age than a monolingual child,” explains Panos Athanasopoulos, Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Lund University. This is because bilingual children routinely use different words to represent the same thing.
“Bilingual children outperform monolingual children on a task which involves putting themselves in someone else’s shoes.”
Bilingual children may benefit from enhanced processing in other areas, too. For instance, they outperform monolingual children on a task which involves putting themselves in someone else’s shoes. In one study, three cars of different sizes were placed in front of four- to six-year-old children, with the smallest car out of the view of the researcher. When the researcher said, “I see a small car, can you move the small car?”, the bilingual children were more likely than the monolingual children to move the medium-sized car, recognising that this was the smallest car the researcher could see. The reasoning here is that bilingual children are constantly paying attention to who speaks which language – they are used to paying attention to other people’s perspectives.
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