Researchers found that while adults may have problems learning a new language, children can learn two native languages as easily as they learn one.
Adults take up special classes, go to tutorials and need a lot of help to learn a new language while children pick up their native language naturally. While this may not sound amusing, researchers from Ithaca College wondered if the process was just as natural and easy-flowing when a child had two native languages and so they conducted a study to find out.
Ithaca College faculty member Skott Freedman found that children were able to learn two native languages as easily as they learnt one.
"At first glance, the process of learning a language can seem incredibly daunting," Freedman, an assistant professor of speech language and pathology and audiology, said in a press statement. "Environmental input presented at a fairly rapid rate must be mapped onto detailed representations in the brain. A word's meaning, sounds, and grammatical function all must be extracted from the incoming speech stream. Yet this potentially arduous task is typically executed with little effort by children barely a year old. In fact, studies show that children can learn a word in as little as one exposure."
Researchers have debated whether such children have one large set of sounds that they use for both languages or two distinctive sound sets for each language. A way to determine this is by analyzing the child's language productions in both languages using some measure of complexity and then comparing the two languages.
The study compared the language productions of five English-Spanish bilingual children during a picture-naming task to the productions of five English-only and five Spanish-only speaking children.
For the study, the researchers measured complexity by studying the sound shapes the child made while speaking. These included the presence of word-final consonants and consonant clusters. Freedman also studied whether the child could approximate their languages.
"A hypothesis proposed several years ago predicts that, though bilingual children may differ in their productions between languages, they will nevertheless maintain a similar level of overall approximation," Freedman said. "The hypothesis was confirmed in a study using an English-Hungarian bilingual child, but no study to date has tested the hypothesis in Spanish, the fastest-growing language in the United States."
Freedman also found that children made more complex forms in Spanish than in English and that no production differences emerged between the bilingual children and their monolingual counterparts in English or Spanish.
Findings of the study were published in the "International Journal of Bilingualism."