Bilingual acquisition

Simona Montanari, PhD Professor, explains how bilingual and monolingual children reach language milestones at the same age
How Children Acquire Bilingual Language Skills
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Bilingual acquisition

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Learning language in a single-language environment or in the bilingual or trilingual environment is really not different. The processes of language acquisition are fundamentally the same. In fact when we look at typical critical language milestones, bilinguals and monolinguals reach these milestones pretty much at the same age. They might babble at the same age at 6 months, they might produce first words at 12 months, they might produce multi-word combinations at 18 months. So all these milestones are reached at the same time. Of course, in able to become really productive and speak two languages, the child will have to hear a sufficient amount of each language.

Simona Montanari, PhD Professor, explains how bilingual and monolingual children reach language milestones at the same age

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Simona Montanari, PhD

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Simona Montanari is Assistant Professor in the Department of Child and Family Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on language development and second language acquisition in childhood. She received a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Southern California specializing in language development in monolingual and multilingual children. Dr. Montanari has published her research in prestigious peer-reviewed journals and she is regularly invited to present on early bilingualism and trilingualism locally and internationally. Dr. Montanari has also been involved in the creation and implementation of an Italian-English dual language program in the Glendale Unified School District, for which she continues to work as a consultant. Dr. Montanari has two trilingual and tri-literate daughters, six and seven years of age.

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Transcription: 
Learning language in a single-language environment or in the bilingual or trilingual environment is really not different. The processes of language acquisition are fundamentally the same. In fact when we look at typical critical language milestones, bilinguals and monolinguals reach these milestones pretty much at the same age. They might babble at the same age at 6 months, they might produce first words at 12 months, they might produce multi-word combinations at 18 months. So all these milestones are reached at the same time. Of course, in able to become really productive and speak two languages, the child will have to hear a sufficient amount of each language.