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> “A child who is learning two languages will have a smaller vocabulary in each than a child who is only learning one; there are only so many hours in the day,
by JohnGB 9y ago
> “A child who is learning two languages will have a smaller vocabulary in each than a child who is only learning one; there are only so many hours in the day, and you’re either hearing English or Spanish,” Dr. Hoff said.
That is rubbish. It depends on how the child is exposed to the various languages and how much exposure they get. My daughter speaks 3 languages at home (one to each adult). We were told exactly this that she would be behind language wise, but we made sure that she was read stories in each of the languages, and had good exposure. She has just started at a bilingual school, and her monolingual English teacher has told us that she is far ahead of the rest of her class language wise.
Yes, this may be an outlier, but every family that I know that has bilingual or more children and who expose the children to enough of each language have children that are ahead of the norm in each of those languages.
If however you simply split the time that you would give in language related activities or conversation between multiple languages, then of course the child will be behind in each one, as you've only exposed them to half the language in each. This is true up to about 7 years old, and non-existent after that anyway.
- jessaustin 9y agoYeah there are lots of monolinguists with poor vocabularies. It's because they never read books, not because they've divided their vocabulary time in too many different language slices.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago>her monolingual English teacher has told us that she is far ahead of the rest of her class language wise // How do you know what her ability in English would be if she'd not had the other 2 languages. Like I've of the languages could have buoyed it up but the other overloaded her and reduced her overall vocabulary. Or many other possibilities. Surely the truth is you hypothesise it had no effect but without re-running her life you can't know one way or the other? What do you mean with your last sentence, it's entirely incoherent to me?
- sumedh 9y ago> How do you know what her ability in English would be if she'd not had the other 2 languages. Not OP. I can speak 3 Indian languages and English. My English is better than native English speakers, I know that because I got above average points in IELTS. Yes when you are learning as a kid things will be little show at first but most kids (sample size of my Indian friends who are trilinguals as well) will be fine after some years.
- resf 9y agoI think by "better" you mean "more properly" ;) I'm sure IELTS doesn't cover important life skills such as "use of the word innit".