Early bilinguals and their capacities for acquiring languages have been studied in depth over the past 70 years. However, research about the benefits and costs of an early childhood spent in a bilingual environment remains scattered and often divergent. This paper intends to examine and delineate these effects of an early childhood in a bilingual household. Particularly, it aims to answer questions as to whether or not people from these bilingual backgrounds have a broader range of language ability and if this broader range causes a reduced understanding of each language compared to the levels of comprehension attained by similar monolingual speakers. There is a notably slim amount of research as to a third question regarding if an early childhood in a bilingual environment perhaps leads to a heightened capacity for acquiring a third language. After approaching the first two questions, this paper investigates the third with theoretical analysis and then proposes a possible study to test its claims.
Effects Upon Range of Language Abilities
Growing up in a bilingual environment would seem to expand one’s range of language trivially, since it would seem to broaden one’s accessible language systems simply through the introduction of a second language. However, children raised in bilingual households do not always learn both languages. De Houwer (2007) found that among 1,899 bilingual families polled in Flanders, in nearly one quarter, none of the family’s children spoke a language aside from Dutch, the majority language of the region. She emphasizes the importance of parental language use and parental language inputs to raising a bilingual child. Other studies (e.g. Pearson 2007) suggest other factors such as literacy, language status, and community support, including schooling in the development of these children’s bilingualism. There are therefore two cases in discussing how growing up in a bilingual environment will affect a child’s range of language ability. In case 1, the child becomes effectively bilingual while in case 2, despite living in a bilingual household, the child does not.
In case 1, for the approximately ¾ of the children who do become bilingual, their breadth of language abilities is clearly augmented by the presence of a second language, simply because they therefore know an additional language structure in comparison to monolinguals who only know one. As for case 2 and the nearly ¼ of these children who do not learn a second language, these children also develop broader language abilities than monolinguals due to spending their early childhoods in bilingual environments. Particularly, even though they fail to learn a second language structurally, they nonetheless have the ability to phonetically process it, an ability which children from monolingual would not possess. Research has shown that at 6-8 months of age, infants respond uniformly to speech regardless of language. But by 10-12 months of age, infants begin to display language-specific perception (Yoshida, Werker et al 2007). However, infants in monolingual households realign their perception of phonology to be single language specific while infants living in bilingual environments begin to effectively discriminate between their family’s two languages. Bosch and Sebastián-Gallés (2001) claim that Spanish-Catalan bilingual infants to distinguish between their two languages by a mere 135 to 139 days of age. These results suggest that even at very young age, infants from bilingual households are equipped to process two languages phonetically, while infants from monolingual households are only equipped for one. Essentially, through the examination of these two cases, regardless of whether or not a child learns a second language, simply the exposure to this second language during early childhood expands the range of his or her language abilities compared to that of children from monolingual backgrounds. The rest of this paper will deal exclusively with case 1, where children from bilingual environments become bilingual themselves.
Strength in Each Language Compared to Monolingual Speakers
In considering the ability of children from bilingual environments to proficiently use each language, there are two issues that must be addressed. First is their short-term ability to acquire both languages in a similar fashion as monolingual speakers and second is their long-term ability to use both languages adeptly. As for the first issue, Hulk & Müller (2000) suggest that crosslinguistic influences in bilingual language acquisition are both predictable and systematic. They also suggest the criteria for crosslinguistic influences to occur: “(1) There is an interface between two modules of grammar (such as pragmatics and syntax), and (2) the two languages overlap in structure at the surface level” (Zwanziger, Allen, & Genesee 2005: 895). However, these criteria have been tested with divergent and often inconclusive results. Hacohen & Schaeffer (2007) corroborate Hulk & Müller’s clam by studying a child, “EK,” in the process of acquiring Hebrew and English simultaneously from birth. They then compared her progress to five Hebrew monolingual controls. EK’s appropriate and inappropriate handling of subjects and verbs matches Hulk & Müller’s criteria. Namely, “influence from English is restricted to phenomena that involve the syntax/pragmatics interface” (Hacohen & Schaeffer 2007: Abstract). Conversely, Zwanziger, Allen, & Genesee (2005) provide diverging evidence in their study of English-Inuktitut simultaneous bilingual children. Although Inuktitut and English satisfy Hulk & Müller’s criteria, there is no noticeable crosslinguistic influence between the languages among the subjects of the study. These results indicate that Hulk & Müller’s criteria are not universal. Regardless of these minor crosslinguistic influences, and more research is required to clarify these effects if they are even significant, a body of work has shown that bilingual children fundamentally systematize both languages at about the same rate as monolingual children (Genesee 2003). Thus, there is no known significant qualitative difference between a bilingual’s and monolingual’s process of acquiring of a native language.
As to the issue of long-term development of language skills, Cummins (1984) shows using a large body of research that there is no evidence that bilingualism negatively affects children’s academic growth. Often times, when educators see a floundering bilingual student, they immediately attribute the student’s shortcomings to their bilingual background, which is in fact unrelated. These sorts of hasty assessments merely compound students’ academic problems as their real academic issues go unaddressed and unresolved. Thus, in reality bilingual students’ academic failures are often due to misconceptions and rashness by their education systems and they are not directly related to the students’ bilingualism itself, which does not compromise their academic development, including in the majority language. Research has also shown that bilinguals also acquire the phonology of their two languages to the same extent that monolingual speakers do (Yoshida, Werker et al 2007). The presence of additional languages does not hinder the development of phonetic recognition and familiarity in any way. So despite general beliefs to the contrary, growing up in a bilingual environment does not limit or impair children’s abilities to speak their two languages at the same skill level as monolingual speakers.
Capacity for Acquiring Further Languages
Hypothetically, maintaining multiple language systems at a young age would heighten infants’ abilities to learn more languages in the future. However, Volterra & Taeschner (1978) propose a universal language system (ULS) hypothesis in which they posit that children exposed to two languages during their infancy go through a period in which they do not distinguish between the two. Instead, by the ULS hypothesis, during this stage, a child living in a bilingual environment considers words from both languages to be part of the same lexical system. Essentially, they argue that bilingual children go through a fundamentally monolingual stage in which they possess only one language system before they become truly bilingual. Most of this theory’s evidence comes from young children’s tendency to frequently code-mix. Volterra and Taeschner suggest that this ULS stage lasts until children are about three years old. This claim would predict that prior three years of age, while the children are still in their ULS stage, they would indiscriminately mix their two languages, since they do not recognize any distinctions between them. They wouldn’t be able to distinguish any language context, because during this stage, they perceive both languages to actually be parts of the same unitary system. Yet, this claim is not supported by recent research and evidence. In a study conducted on English-French bilingual children (Genesee et al 1995), researchers observed that children between 22-26 months in “1 parent, 1 language” households use the appropriate language for each of their parents, indicating that the children perceive their parents as representative of 2 different language contexts. Because the children might be simply associating certain words with a certain parent, they may not truly be differentiating their two languages. So the same researchers conducted the same experiment using monolingual strangers as the interlocutors to test the children’s sensitivity to language context. In this scenario, the children, generally in the 1-2 word stage of utterances, predominantly used the appropriate language, again suggesting that at about 22-26 months of age, well before the 3 year threshold of Volterra and Taeschner, children already have control over differentiated language systems. After studying a Spanish-English bilingual child, Deuchar & Quay (2005) suggest that this distinction occurs even earlier, around 20 months of age and that by this age, children possess differentiated syntactic, lexical, and phonological systems.
Time and time again, research has demonstrated that people are most able to learn language-based skills at young ages. The younger people are, the more able they are to learn these skills and abilities. Also, exposure to multiple languages during early childhood engenders in children the ability to retain multiple language systems. This skill is crucial for and central to learning any additional language at any time. So, by obtaining this integral skill in early childhood, children from bilingual households are ingraining it and learning it better than they would at a later stage. They would therefore be better equipped to learn a third language than monolingual speakers are to learn a second one. Also, by knowing multiple language systems, when approaching a new one, children from bilingual backgrounds would have more reference points than monolingual speakers would. They would be able to see more lexical, syntactic, and phonetic similarities between the new language and the familiar languages that they already know simply because they have a broader range of familiar languages than monolingual speakers. So again, bilingual speakers would be better prepared to learn new languages than monolingual speakers.
Unfortunately, little research exists comparing bilinguals’ and monolinguals’ ability to learn nonnative languages. A study could be conducted in the following fashion to address this issue. The purpose of this study would be to investigate the question of how students from bilingual and monolingual backgrounds differ and are similar in the developmental stages of acquiring new unfamiliar languages, both in terms of speed and proficiency. Due to the above theoretical analysis, a significant pattern of bilinguals outperforming monolinguals would be predicted.
Method
Design
High-school language classes would be effective pools to draw from or this study since in them bilinguals and monolinguals receive the same instruction and education. Ideally, to get truly comprehensive results, researchers would observe various foreign language classes over extended periods of time and note the development and approaches of monolinguals and bilinguals. However, this form of a study would be incredibly time and labor intensive, and therefore would be infeasible for all practical purposes. So instead, to test the predictions above and to investigate the questions posed, participants will be tested in the new language after consistent intervals of instruction. They will then be given a survey at a later date asking them about the easiest and most difficult lexical, syntactic, and phonetic aspects of learning the new language.
Participants
The participants used in this study will be high school students in introductory foreign language classes. They will be selected from various high schools that cross socio-economic demographics so as to eliminate the potentially confounding variable of class. No participant will have had any previous exposure or instruction in the language being taught, as this prior experience would compromise the data, as the study should only focus on bilinguals and monolinguals learning a new language in parallel. A relatively equal number of females and males will be used so as to eliminate the variable of gender.
Materials
The tests and surveys will be conducted using a standardized set of instructions. Prior to the test, a standardized questionnaire will be used to determine whether or not the subject spent their early childhood in a bilingual environment and if so, whether or not he or she became bilingual. The questionnaire will also determine if the subject is bilingual by some other means. The test will be entirely in the foreign language, without using the majority language in the instructions or questions at all so as to insure that only foreign language aptitude is being tested. It will have 3 sections, each with a different focus: a lexical part, a syntactic part, and a phonetic part.
Procedure
The tests and surveys will be conducted in quiet rooms within the students’ high schools that are not the classrooms used for foreign language instruction. The tests will be given without any prior notice, so as to test the participants’ current language skills and not their abilities to study for examinations. The test and the survey will all be given on separate dates so that they don’t influence one another, which could compromise the integrity of the results. The test will be given within a lenient but standardized and enforced time limit, such that all participants are tested equally. The participants will not be able to talk during the examinations. During the tests, they will not be able to ask questions, but during the survey, they will be able to ask the proctor questions for clarification.
The results of these surveys and tests will be stratified into four different groups: monolingual students from monolingual backgrounds (m-m students), bilingual students from monolingual backgrounds (b-m students), bilingual students from bilingual backgrounds (b-b students), and monolingual students from bilingual backgrounds (m-b students). The results will also be stratified by school so that students are compared only to other students within their class at school to eliminate the confounding variable of instruction methodology and quality.
Discussion
Through the theoretical analyses above and by previous research, the basic hypotheses driving this study is that children from bilingual environments are better equipped than children with monolingual backgrounds to learn a new language. According hypothesis (a), it would be predicted that students with bilingual backgrounds would outperform students with monolingual backgrounds, regardless of whether or not they are currently monolingual or bilingual. In other words, b-b and m-b students would both outperform m-m and b-m students. However, the differences between the performance of these different categories of students on the test should be fairly nuanced.
First, b-b students should outperform all other categories because they reap all of the benefits of bilingualism: they have a broader range of lexical, syntactic, and phonetic reference points and they have the experience of maintaining two language systems at a young age. Conversely, m-m students share none of these benefits. However, m-b and b-m students have an intriguing mix of them which should reflect on their tests. The m-b students lack the breadth of lexical and syntactic reference points of b-b students simply because they are monolingual and have a firm grasp over only one language system. Yet they still have a wide range of phonetic reference points because the phonetic distinctions of a language are ingrained at a young age simply by exposure, regardless of whether or not the child become bilingual, and these m-b students lived in bilingual environments during their early childhood. The issue of having the experience of maintaining two language systems at a young age is an uncertain one for m-b students since some children raised in bilingual environments learn parts of the minority language structure and never become fully proficient while others simply never pick it up. The b-m students would have a very different set of such skills due to their bilingual capacity but monolingual background. They would have a broadened set of lexical and syntactic reference points because of their bilingualism. But they would not have quite as far-reaching phonetic comparisons since they were exposed to a monolingual environment during the most formative time period for phonetic differentiation. The same holds true for their experience with simultaneously retaining two language systems. So, by the predictions of the hypothesis and this paper’s lines of reasoning, m-b students should outperform b-m students on the phonetic parts of the test while the results from the other two sections are uncertain and obscured.
It could be argued that the method of this study is biased against bilinguals since classroom instruction tends to be geared towards monolinguals and may not adequately address the learning styles of bilinguals. However, the question at hand does not relate to how monolinguals and bilinguals learn new languages in a vacuum, but rather how they learn languages in modern society. For better or for worse, modern society includes these potentially impartial methods of instruction, and so this study should not attempt to correct for these biases.
Overall, exposure to bilingualism during early childhood seems to have only beneficial effects on children’s language skills. It broadens the range of children’s language systems without sacrificing understanding of these systems and it even perhaps heightens the children’s ability to acquire third languages with speed and ease.
Hacohen, Aviya, Jeanette C. Schaeffer. "Subject realization in early Hebrew/English bilingual acquisition: The role of crosslinguistic influence." Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 10 (2007): 333-344.
De Houwer, Annick. "Parental language input patterns and children's bilingual use." Applied Psycholinguistics 28 (2007): 411-424.
Pearson, Barbara Zurer. "Social factors in childhood bilingualism in the United States." Applied Psycholinguistics 28 (2007): 399-410.
Yoshida, Katherine A., Janet F. Werker, Tracey C. Burns, Karen Hill. "The development of phonetic representation in bilingual and monolingual infants." Applied Psycholinguistics 28 (2007): 455-474.
Henderson, Mara. "Margaret Deuchar & Suzanne Quay, Bilingual acquisition: Theoretical implications of a case study." Language in Society 34 (2005): 141-145.
Zwanziger, Elizabeth E., Shanley E. M. Allen, Fred Genesee. "Crosslinguistic influence in bilingual acquisition: subject omission in learners of Inuktitut and English." Journal of Child Language 32 (2005): 893-909.
Dewaele, Jean-Marc, Alex Housen, & Li Wei (Ed.). (2003). Bilingualism: Beyond Basic Principles. Clevedon: Multilingualism Matters.
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