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My experience (Canadian in Canada) may shed light. Our daughter’s speech development seemed delayed. A speech therapist with experience with bilingual parents

My experience (Canadian in Canada) may shed light. Our daughter’s speech development seemed delayed. A speech therapist with experience with bilingual parents with different mother tongues gave us great advice: I was to speak to her exclusively in English, her mother in French, so that she could tell the difference. What we spoke between us was irrelevant. Within a very short time she was speaking both equally well and it wasn’t long before she was switching mid sentence as well. So the “doctrine” could be a more rigid, simplified statement of that advice. It is very common for kids to acquire multiple languages simultaneously, but it seems to require clearly distinct user groups, e.g., think immigrant kids who speak one language at home and another with their friends or at school. But if the user groups are less distinct, it may be harder for the child to puzzle the languages apart and learn how either works.

jacobolus 4y ago
Fair enough. And congrats on teaching your kid to speak multiple languages. That is a wonderful skill that will serve her well. But this is like for a 1–3 year old, maybe 5 or 6 at the outside. After the kids are reasonably fluent in at least their native language, I can’t imagine throwing occasional foreign words is going to give them unreasonable difficulty. I was thrown by the word “children” in the top-level comment. > seems to require clearly distinct user groups I’d be interested to see the research on this. I am skeptical that this is required. Side note: pretty well every language learner goes through a phase where they quickly jump from very limited ability to produce speech to impressive levels of fluency, in a relatively short stretch of time (weeks to months). Those leaps of improvement are not necessarily related to any specific external stimulus.

jacobolus 4y ago

Fair enough. And congrats on teaching your kid to speak multiple languages. That is a wonderful skill that will serve her well. But this is like for a 1–3 year old, maybe 5 or 6 at the outside. After the kids are reasonably fluent in at least their native language, I can’t imagine throwing occasional foreign words is going to give them unreasonable difficulty. I was thrown by the word “children” in the top-level comment. > seems to require clearly distinct user groups I’d be interested to see the research on this. I am skeptical that this is required. Side note: pretty well every language learner goes through a phase where they quickly jump from very limited ability to produce speech to impressive levels of fluency, in a relatively short stretch of time (weeks to months). Those leaps of improvement are not necessarily related to any specific external stimulus.