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Preliminary Results:

New findings from the following ongoing research in the FAU Language Development Lab:

• "Phonological Memory and Language in Young Monolingual and Bilingual Children"

Phonological Memory is Related to Vocabulary Size

One finding emerging from our study of monolingual children acquiring English is that the process of learning words builds on early knowledge of language sounds. We found that children's accuracy at repeating nonsense sounds (at 22 months) is related to their vocabulary size (at 22 months and at 25 months). Ongoing studies of bilingual children will help us understand whether this ability to accurately repeat sounds is related to language experience.

Learning Spanish Doesn't Need to Compete with Learning English

Our study of bilingual children's English and Spanish vocabulary development has already shown that children who know more English do not necessarily know less Spanish. Like monolingual children, bilingual children develop at different rates for a variety of reasons, and some children will have bigger total vocabularies than others. The balance of English and Spanish in children's experience is related to the balance of English and Spanish words children know, but the total size of their vocabularies is not affected by being bilingual. If parents provide children with rich language experience in both languages, learning one language need not compete with learning another.

Bilingual Children Learn As Many Words As Monolingual Children

Parents, teachers, and language clinicians often ask how to judge whether a bilingual child is developing language normally. The results of our study begin to provide an answer to this question.

The data we collected on monolingual and bilingual children at 22 and 25 months of age show that bilingual children and monolingual children have very similar average vocabulary sizes - when the number of English and Spanish words that bilingual children knew are added together. What this means is that, on average, bilingual children know as many words as monolingual children, but their knowledge is spread across two languages.

A normally developing bilingual child at 22 months should not be expected to know as many English words as an English monolingual child. Although children can successfully acquire two languages, it is important to appreciate that even for children, language learning takes time and it takes a little more time (not twice as long, but that's another story) to learn two languages than to learn one.