The Language Development Lab

Home Page

Parent Information

Información para los padres

Contact & Directions

Publications

People

Results

Parent Resources

Preliminary Results:

New findings from our research in the FAU Language Development Lab:

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.

At the beginning of April 2009, we presented the first findings from our study of early monolingual and bilingual development at the meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD). We reported that in South Florida, bilingual children can come from homes in which both parents are highly educated. Typically, children exposed to Spanish and English at home have at least one parent who is a native speaker of Spanish. These parents value both English and Spanish proficiency for their children and consider being bilingual to be an advantage. We found, from the diary records that many of the parents kept, that bilingual children with two native Spanish-speaking parents hear more Spanish than they do English overall, and they also have more contexts---such as mealtimes---that are consistently Spanish-speaking contexts. Children with one parent who is a native English speaker hear more English than Spanish, but in many such households the children still have some people and contexts in which only Spanish is used. We plan to investigate how important these sorts of experiences are to the children's Spanish language development.

Looking at the bilingual children's language development, we found that they were not different from monolingual English-speaking children in their ability to repeat the sounds of each language. So for Spanish and English, it seems that children can learn the sound systems of the two languages on the same schedule as monolingual children learn one language. In terms of vocabulary and grammar development, the result is a little different. The bilingual children were learning just as much as the monolingual children, but their knowledge was divided between two languages. That means that the bilingual children were just a few months behind the monolingual children in the development of English during this period from 22 to 30 months of age.

We think it is very important for parents and teachers of bilingual children to know that it is normal for children to take longer to learn two languages than to learn one. This does not mean that the child is confused by hearing two languages. We are planning to continue our studies to see what the normal course of bilingual development is as children get older.

To find out more information about the posters we recently presented in April 2009 at the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD), please click on each poster.

• Demographic Characteristics and Language Attitudes of Parents Raising Bilingual Children

• Influences on Toddlers' Dual Language Exposure in Bilingual Homes

• Effects of Dual Language Exposure on Early Lexical Growth

• Phonological Accuracy in Repetition Tasks by Bilingual Toddlers