The Limitations Of Research Methods

While in the womb a hearing baby will develop language from hearing the mother’s and other people’s voices. Once born the baby will prefer the mother’s voice the most, so it natural that the baby will pick up primarily on the language that his/her mother speaks the most. Also babies are good at observing facial expressions. Often the baby will watch facial expressions, trying to connect the words that they hear to the expression they are observing. Shortly after this, around the time the baby is six months old they can distinguish their native language being spoken by observing the mouth movement of one speaking. Learning language for hearing children is the most simple because they will learn what they are hearing. I they are hearing one specific language being fluently spoken all of the time they will pick up on it and begin to mock what they hear. For example, if a one or two year old constantly hears his parents argue and curse back and forth to each other he may go to daycare and repeat a curse word that he heard from his parents. This happens simply because he is in the deferred imitation phase and this is what he has picked up on. Learning language for a baby who is not hearing impaired or hears multiple languages will learn to speak very

Kan and Kohnert (2005) investigated the lexical-sematic development of preschool bilinguals at a Hmong-English preschool. Nineteen typically developing, native Hmong speakers ranging in ages from 3-5 participated in this study. The researchers decided to measure the lexical-sematic development of their participants using picture naming and picture identification tasks. They selected items from the English version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDI; Fenson et al., 1993). Two bilingual preschool teachers from the school chose items from the inventory they felt were culturally relevant to the preschoolers they taught. The researchers selected 100 nouns from the teacher selected tasks to use in their measure. Then they taught the teachers to administer the measure because neither of the researchers spoke Hmong. The researchers used procedural reliability to ensure bilingual preschool teachers could administer Hmong tasks without error. Pui Fong Kan observed during the administration of these tasks. She conducted the

There are many myths about bilingualism having negative effects. One of those myths are that babies are hopelessly confused by exposure to two languages. However, studies have proven that learning more than one language as an infant is actually very beneficial and not difficult to do. According to Judith F. Kroll, babies develop the ability to discriminate the languages that they listen to and are more open to learning a new language. A study by Ferran Pons and other colleagues, revealed how bilingual children show an earlier attentional shift to the mouth. This is due to the fact that bilingual infants rely more on the perceptual salient of audiovisual speech cues in order to to construct two different language systems. Furthermore, another

Major Myth #3: Your Child Will Be Delayed In Their Speech Development If They Are Raised With Two Languages

We learned in our text that the development of language is a complicated process that involves phonemes, morphemes, syntactic development among several other factors (Siegler, DeLoache, Eisenberg & Saffran, 2014, p. 218). Proper and effective development of these language skills has been shown to have a critical learning period that enables successful fluency of a language; this period usually occurs between the ages of 5 and puberty (Siegler et al., 2014, p. 220). I believe that this critical period is the backbone of the argument against bilingual education. Proponents of this argument believe that the sooner a child is immersed in the new language, the better off they will be with regards to mechanics and use of that language.

Surprisingly, an article by Kuhl (2015) stated that babies are born to master any language around the world if given a chance. In her research work together with other colleagues, tested American babies from Seattle who were nine-months old, who were divided into three groups. The first group was with babies who had Mandarin Chinese teachers who talked and played with them using toys and books. The second groups were babies who watched Mandarin Chinese, while the others, listened to a radio talking in Mandarin. The last group was the controlled group where in, they were not exposed to see or hear any Mandarin language but, only heard graduate students who speak in English. Nonetheless, these babies were allowed to play with the other groups

In this article, the researchers employed usage-based theories in their study in order to examine the language development of bilingual children. The purpose of their study was to investigate the various factors that affect vocabulary and story recall abilities of bilingual children in both of their languages. The researchers targeted the following factors: the children’s exposure to their two language (determined by the length of time that the children lived in the United States), the age at which the children were communicated with regularly in English, the language(s) currently used by mothers, fathers, and teachers

It is normal to worry about your child’s development as soon as your start to expose a child to a second language. Some bilingual children in fact may start speaking a bit later than other kids, but then so do some monolingual children. Children will mix words up and sentences when learning a second language, this is a normal part of becoming bilingual. Parents should not worry about these myths. Gigi Luk, an associate professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education has found that, “bilingualism is an experience that shapes our brain for a lifetime.” (20xx, para.

We may see teaching our children different languages as a means for them to communicate with our extender family and pass on our cultural heritage or as extender knowledge for the child. In addition to the aforementioned reasons to learn more than one language, research indicates there is

(2006)). In his article Kluger (2013) suggests that a person who learns two languages as a child might have a cognitive advantage. According to him, a bilingual brain may not be more intelligent, but it is more adaptable. He says people start learning languages earlier than delivery. The baby can hear her/his mother’s voice before birth, and when they are born they are already familiar with the language. He mentions that one study found that if a baby’s mother is monolingual, the baby only sucked his pacifier more vigorously when he heard English, while the baby with a bilingual mother sucked harder when they heard either language spoken by the parent. Vigorous sucking indicates the child is stimulated. These findings show that babies can figure out they are hearing different languages. Also, when they hear these languages their responses are different.

It is easier for babies to become bilingual because when they hear two different languages their brains start to pick up sounds and vowels that each language makes. Babies become bilingual because they are born with the ability to distinguish different sounds in languages. Being bilingual strengthens their ability to distinguish different sounds. This makes their brain more flexible.

Lastly, it is important to include Norm Chomsky every time we talk about language acquisition. Through his studies we can say that children can learn a new language because of their innate ability in their brain to be able to classify different words, specifically grammatical terms. He suggested that we have a device in our brain which he called a Language Acquisition Device that allows children to notice the differences between two languages. In my opinion if all of us have this device. All the child needs to stimulate it to be able to learn those important first words that a child is going to need as they further exposed into a language.

They compared bilingualism in children with typical development and those with communication disorders. They emphasized that children become bilingual to a different degree; using different paths. For some, there is an exposure to a different language at a very early stage in life, and for some it only occurs once they are 3 years old, and enter the schools for education. In some cases when the home language is not supported in school, the child will have reduced opportunities to experiment the language thus becoming receptively bilingual, meaning they would understand their home language but lack in expressive skills in that language. However, Kohnert (2010) reports that continued support in the home language during preschool years is directly related to cognitive and academic gains in later age. While the research has ample advantages of a bilingual environment for typically developing kid but it changes when a kid has a developmental delay or communication disorder like autism. Most parents and professionals are still fearful of using more than one language with children who have significant communication problems. The authors elaborated that there is a significant scarcity in the literature comparing the performance of bilingual and monolingual children with communication disorders. However, they agreed to a growing body of research that maintains that bilingual children with disabilities can use their first language to acquire a second language if trained systematically. Authors maintain that children who are exposed to two languages may benefit to a great degree from a bilingual approach to intervention. (e.g., Kohnert, 2010, 2013). Finally on the serving needs of children who are bilingual and with a communication

The first myth of the monolingual brain means that infant’s brains are monolingual and treat two different languages as the same language. This, however, is untrue; infants can learn two languages at the same time and will not get confused between the two. Evidence for the myth of the monolingual brain comes from developmental milestones, differentiated use of two languages, and grammatical constraints on bilingual code mixing. In regards to developmental milestones, bilingualism versus monolingualism has no known consequences for phonological

This situation also supports the statement of Lyon(1996) that children become bilingual across the world in many communities and this can play a major part in the families into which they are born, and in their later lives at school. Bilingualism occurs within complex, multi-layered context, but from the child’s point of view the family is where it all begins.