Bilingual vs Monolingual Talking Milestone

I just read an article by Lauran Neergaard, AP Medical Writer of the Associated press - Jul 21, 2009 called "Unraveling how children become bilingual so easily" link . It doesn't necessarily talk about how, but it has tested scientific data that shows that children can easily learn more than language at the same time that they learn just one. It also says that the best time is before they are 7.



I'm all for being bilingual, it's just too bad that I don't speak my native tongue fluently enough to pass it on to my girls.



Here are some excerpts from the article:

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Time out — how do you test a baby? By tracking eye gaze. Make a fun toy appear on one side or the other whenever there's a particular sound. The baby quickly learns to look on that side whenever he or she hears a brand-new but similar sound. Noninvasive brain scans document how the brain is processing and imprinting language.

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It's remarkable that babies being raised bilingual — by simply speaking to them in two languages — can learn both in the time it takes most babies to learn one. On average, monolingual and bilingual babies start talking around age 1 and can say about 50 words by 18 months.



Italian researchers wondered why there wasn't a delay, and reported this month in the journal Science that being bilingual seems to make the brain more flexible.


The researchers tested 44 12-month-olds to see how they recognized three-syllable patterns — nonsense words, just to test sound learning. Sure enough, gaze-tracking showed the bilingual babies learned two kinds of patterns at the same time — like lo-ba-lo or lo-lo-ba — while the one-language babies learned only one, concluded Agnes Melinda Kovacs of Italy's International School for Advanced Studies.
While new language learning is easiest by age 7, the ability markedly declines after puberty.

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What might help people who missed their childhood window? Baby brains need personal interaction to soak in a new language — TV or CDs alone don't work. So researchers are improving the technology that adults tend to use for language learning, to make it more social and possibly tap brain circuitry that tots would use.

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I'm not too worried about my kids not having the extra ability of growing up speaking two languages. I do believe that it can be learned at a later time, it'll just be a little bit harder. If there was one language that I would like for them to learn, I think it would be chinese or maybe Hindi.

My children continue to amaze me with what they can learn and do already.