Native Language, and Its Acquisition Within a Bilingual Environment

Abstract

Many are born into families where more than one language is spoken, and there may be a different language spoken outside of the household. This flow of linguistic information is somehow encoded into the brains of those bilingual children. After growing up, the bilingual child ends up being fluent in both of those languages (or not, depending on the situation) that surround them. No matter the outcome, compared to monolingual children, a bilingual child’s language acquisition and socio-psychological development will be different. Depending on the situation, a child raised in a bilingual environment may have delay or acceleration in language acquisition, better or worse language proficiency, and learning capabilities. Being bilingual may provide more advantages in terms neural cognition.

Introduction

This paper will be identifying the differences between bilingual and monolingual language acquisition in children, and exploring their various differences, which could come up in later development. Being bilingual seems like an advantage in terms of the ability to communicate with more people across cultures, but there are other, subtler, advantages that a bilingual speaker could have. These advantages may influence a bilingual child’s socio-psychological development in ways they would not a monolingual counterpart.

Language Acquisition

Much research has been done on the phenomenon of language acquisition, showing that children, whether they are born blind, deaf, or have a neurodevelopmental disorder, can still develop robust linguistic skills. The acquisition of language is a complex skill inherent to human nature. There have been numerous studied stages to language acquisition and numerous components in which a child’s linguistic development depends on, no matter the amount of languages surrounding them. Bilingual and trilingual children go through the same general stages of language acquisition as monolingual children do (Maneva, 2004).

According to Sebastian-Galles (2010), bilingual children do not necessarily have delayed development, and they are able to discriminate two different languages within their environment at the same time, learn word-object associations, and tune their inventories of phonemes. However, the developmental process for bilingual children does differ. For example, bilingual children develop their own processing strategies, which allow them to cope with the amount of linguistic input. Also, this double input makes the bilingual children pay more attention to additional auditory cues, thus being more receptive to discriminate sounds.

Bilingualism in Later Life

Bilinguals are slower to name pictures in comparison to monolinguals, but the time in accessing the meaning of those pictures does not differ. The fact that a bilingual is unable to name things as quickly as a monolingual can be explained by the fact that bilinguals are less practiced in both languages and “words in their mental lexicon are effectively at a lower level of functional frequency.” Other possibilities to explain this delay is that bilinguals might be going through a competitive process while speaking, or there is an output buffer where the unnecessary or “non-target item” needs to be suppressed or eliminated.

Identity

According to Karmela Liebkind, there are multiple factors one could consider in order to decide whether or not one feels that they have a bilingual identity. The obvious one is origin when the family is bilingual, and there are two languages from the beginning of one’s life. The second factor is language proficiency whether one is proficient or equally fluent in two languages. The third factor is “language function” whether one can freely switch between languages out of own choice or on the demand of society. The last, and most important factor is one’s attitude. If one feels bilingual, then that is how others should identify them, and not the other way around. According to Liebkind, being bilingual provides a multitude of subtle advantages in one’s cognitive processes.