Last year was a rough one. There was a lot to do and sometimes I wondered if I was going to make those deadlines and be the prompt, dependable, and reliable SLP (which somehow equates to competent) that we University types try to develop in new clinicians. I'm grateful that there is another day, and even better, a brand new year. What a great opportunity to start all over again.
This year will be a year of change for me. I'm planning a change in my location and work. I don't know yet where I'll go, but I have full confidence that it'll be good. I have the belief that I should never make a decision based on fear. Making a decision based on fear is like trying to walk in the dark. Change is then an opportunity for something great, it's an adventure for something unseen, and for me change is always full of excitement of something new and different. I'll let you know when I know where I'm relocating. I've been writing a chapter for Dolores Battles' 3rd edition of Communication Disorders in Multicultural Populations. The chapter title is "Bilingual Language Development and Language Disorders." I'm giving you one section to think about. It's still in draft form and will probably change by the time it's published in November, 2001. My purpose in the chapter is to summarize what I think are important concepts that I believe will help SLP's when evaluating children who are bilingual. I hope this will be useful to you. I have great year!
Three issues appear to be of interest in this age group. The first is at what age is the child aware of the two languages; second, how much language mixing is typical; and thirdly, and what should the vocabulary growth be like at this age?
Awareness of 2 languages is important so that the child can begin separating the languages, and for language and cognitive development (Arnberg, 1987). Quay (1995) suggests that children have the ability to differentiate between two languages before age two, before the pre-syntactic one-word state of language acquisition. Genesee (1989) and Goodz (1994) suggest that prelinguistic infants differentiate two languages by using differences in the prosody of each language, such as intonation, stress, and rhythm as cues. Goodz (1994) states that infants hear each language as a different melody and that different languages may be as distinct for infants as different songs.
Fantini's (1985) son made preferences for Spanish speakers before 2 years of age by becoming endearing to Spanish speakers and ignoring English speakers. Arnberg (1987), Genesee (1989) and Vihman ((1985) state that the child becomes aware of the two languages by using a number of strategies.
The child:
- learns about the languages;
- relies on phonetic cues to differentiate the languages;
- relates situational variables of word use;
- attends to adult use of language;
- learns language use through social experiences; and
- becomes increasingly sensitive to adult standards and attempts to match those standards.
Language mixing is reported in the majority of child infant studies and is reported up to age 3 years. Quay (1995) states studies which interpret mixing as showing a lack of language differentiation do not take into account the fact that bilingual child may lack the appropriate vocabulary and not have a choice in their language use. Infant studies report that the parents of simultaneous bilingual children separate the languages by speakers to assist the child in developing language awareness and hopefully, reducing the time that the child is language mixing. This may not be the practice for many bilingual parents who regularly switch languages in the home. A major variable to the frequency of mixing would appear to be the caregiver's use of the two languages and whether they use intrasentential switches versus intrasentential switches. What this may suggest is that for some typical language learning children, separation of the two languages and language mixing may continue for a longer period of time. Or what may happen frequently, is that the child recognizes that the members of the community speak both languages, and the child chooses only one of the languages, that is, the language of status, number of community speakers of the language, and television, English.
For speech language pathologists, an important concept is that mixing over time should decrease. Redlinger & Park (1980) state that language mixing may occur approximately 20-30% in Brown's stage I, 12-20% in Stage II; 6-12% in Stage III, and 2-6% in Stages IV and V. A number of language samples over a period of time should provide evidence that the child is separating the languages and that mixing the languages is decreasing. Caregiver language models are an important variable when determining the amount of mixing that is occurring for a child.
Expressive vocabulary has been another area that is of interest. Researchers have attempted to determine whether the two vocabularies develop in parallel, if specific strategies were necessary to acquire them, and whether they were quantitatively comparable to the vocabularies of monolingual children. Goodz (1994) states that early simultaneous bilingualism does not result in a delay in the appearance of first words, nor does it retard vocabulary development. There is unequal progress in the two languages, but vocabulary development compares favorably with the development of monolingual children in at least one language.
Volterra & Taeschner (1978) determined that with their 3 Italian-English speaking subjects, they used words belonging to both languages. When noting words plus the context, that although corresponding words were produced the children did not appear to consider these words as exactly corresponding to each other and that synonyms were found in the early vocabulary of the these children. Taeschner (83) identified 2 stages in bilingual lexical acquisition. In the first stage the bilingual child has no equivalents, 1 lexical system composed of words from both languages. In the second stage, which begins after the child has acquired approximately 50 words, the child builds a system of equivalents for those words that the child has mastered well. The context strongly influences the child's word choice and use. Taeschner (1983) states that although the bilingual child may have fewer words than the monolingual, when all of the words in the bilingual's two languages are counted, the child will have a slightly larger lexicon than the monolingual.
Quay (1994) on the other hand, states that the child begins to use equivalents immediately, in some instances using both words in one utterance. This may be a factor of parent modeling. In observing Mexican-American parents who are bilingual and attempt to model two languages to young children, these parents will give both words at one time (doggie-perrito), to assure that the child is receiving both languages for the object. Patterson (1998) and Pearson, Fernandez, & Oller (1993) have reported that the bilingual infants' average total expressive vocabulary in Spanish and English combined was similar to the average expressive vocabulary of monolingual English or Spanish speaking children. Patterson (1998) stated that 100% of 26-27 month olds used 50 words and that 90% of children who were combining words had a vocabulary of at least 50 words. These reports are only of expressive vocabulary. Receptive vocabulary should be of critical importance in the determining whether a language disorder exists.
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