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Some parents fear that teaching their children several languages from an early age may result in a delay in the age of speaking. Research shows that being spoken and listened to will play a greater role in a child’s language development than whether they are being spoken to in one or multiple languages.

In many parts of the world, learning a majority language such as English, Spanish, French or Chinese will provide a child with a wide range of future educational and professional opportunities. 

Despite this, some parents show misgivings when it comes to enrolling their children in bilingual schools in which they will be taught in two different languages, due to the belief that they might not achieve full proficiency in either. 

At home, families can also have very different linguistic approaches. While some will find speaking two or three different languages at home is an obvious shortcut for their children, other parents may fear that teaching their children several languages from an early age can result in a delay in the age of speaking.

Why should a child be granted the chance to be bilingual? 

• It opens the door to an international education. 

• It provides a competitive advantage in the job market and higher bargaining power in face of their employers. 

• It helps develop higher intercultural competence. 

• It leads to more flexible and critical thinking, better understanding of the world and empathy. 

• It strengthens executive functions: self-regulation, working memory attention span and switching. 

• It has cognitive health benefits with age such as delay of the onset of Alzheimer and double the chances of recovering from a stroke. 

The myths of bilingualism 

As both languages are constantly active at the same time in a bilingual person’s brain, research has shown that bilingual people may experience the ‘tip of the tongue’ episode more often than monolinguals. This difference is hardly relevant in practice.

It has been proved that bilingual individuals can have more reduced vocabulary related to a home context (Ellen Bialystok, Gigi Luk, Kathleen F. Peets, and Sujin Yang, 2009), due to divided exposure to both languages. However, this does not necessarily mean that a bilingual child will know and use a more restricted range of words or it may not be the ultimate reason why this is the case.

In the 1990s, B. Hart and T. Risley found a direct connection between the number of words spoken to children by their primary caregivers. This research, popularised as the ‘30 Million World Gap’, concluded that a child’s language skills are critically influenced by how much their parents speak to them during their first three years of life. This policy-influencing study implied that children from high-income families will have been exposed to 32 million words more than low-income families by the age of three. 

Further research carried out in 1994 and 2017 also pointed towards the relationship between language of children at an early age and their socioeconomic background. Additionally, the 1994 study highlighted that these children’s early language skills were predictors of their outcomes in kindergarten and elementary school.

Whether the gap goes as far as 30 million words or is rather only a few thousand words wide, research has made clear the importance of direct interaction between children and adults for building linguistic competence. Dividing a child’s language input into two different languages should not take a high toll on their vocabulary as long as the adults that accompany them take every chance to share meaningful interactions.

The role of technology in early language learning

Some of the studies mentioned above might not have had the chance to measure the influence of technology in early vocabulary building. Although staring at a tablet or TV screen could never replace a real adult-child interaction in the language learning process, future research might be able to evidence how certain vocabulary can be enriched thanks to our current easy access to songs, games, films and cartoons in any language. 

Families who decided to speak to their children in a different language from that of their home country before the advent of the Internet, had fewer opportunities of exposing their children to it, both in terms of time and contexts.

On the other hand, Stanislas Dehaene (2023) in an interview for Spanish newspaper El País, warns about the danger of parents being absorbed by their phones and failing to provide their children with the linguistic input they need during the first 18 months of their lives to adequately develop their language skills.

Holistic learning

Bilingualism is not a static state. A person’s level of proficiency in each language will vary throughout their lives and depending on the context. Interacting with the languages in different contexts and situations will help enrich a child’s vocabulary.

Being spoken and listened to will be key to the development of any language and directly related to a person’s early performance and academic outcomes. Children will need to be read to and will benefit from playing and interacting with adults.

All of these factors will play a greater role in a child’s mastery in a language and in their overall linguistic development than whether they are being spoken to in one or multiple languages.

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