Bilingualism in Children Language Development

Bilingualism in Children Language Development
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Introduction
Learning to speak is a remarkable phenomenon, in every child’s life. It brings a new experience as the child can now relate with the adults in their life much easily, than before (Baycrest, 2013). For the first six or so years in their lives, children learn around three words for every day that passes. At the end of that period the child ought to have mastered over fifty thousand word in order to master the language and become a fluent speaker. In addition the child is required to learn all the syntaxes, metaphors, illusions, synonyms and everything that entails the library of grammar (HYPERLINK "http://blogs.redorbit.com/author/connie/" \t "_blank"Connie, 2013). For the bilinguals it means, multiplying that effort by the factor of two, to make them fluent in two languages as they grow. Most of the researchers suggest that the first language is mostly of the native tongue, which means the first language they learn in their life is from informal training, mostly from the parents or the guardians. There are several cases that can lead to a child speaking more than one language and one of them is related with immigration. Where the child’s family relocates to another country that speaks a foreign language and the child is forced to learn the new tongue as it is the same one probably used in the formal education systems (Kluger, 2013). The other common case is where the child is born of two parents that speak different languages. In this last case if one of the parents is using the language that the formal systems use then the child will end up speaking two languages as a bilingual. However, if the two parents are using different languages than the main formal language in the country, then the child ends up speaking three languages as a trilingual (Callan, 2008).
Thesis statement
The polyglots’ mind is in particular peculiar and in the recent past the scientists have been closely monitoring the abilities of these people, regarding how it is they can acquire as well as the effects the learning process has on the development of the child’s language (Baycrest, 2013). The ability of a child to be in a position to use to languages fluently has it benefits and disadvantages, all of which transcend into the future of the child’s life with varying effects. Research has however, shown that there are more long-term benefits than there are during their developmental stages, which makes the polyglots better adapted to their environment in the old age than the monolinguals at the same age (Lanir, 2013).
Developmental benefits to a bilingual child
Usually as the bilinguals learn and develop their linguistics skills, they are able to analyze semantically the sentence structures much better than the monolinguals, which ties in to their ability to discern the relationship between the words in every sentence. This makes the bilinguals creative thinkers, as compared to the monolinguals. According to research findings, the bilinguals are better at formulating concepts in their head, given their ability to think openly.
As the child learns the different languages they grow in their metalinguistic understanding and meaning of the various words in the different languages. This is usually as a result of learning tow complex systems (Nicolet, 2012). As the child is exposed to the different languages that have complex differences in their syntactical and grammatical structures, the child with practice is able to develop a very advanced sense of understanding. It therefore improves the child’s ability to think through complex solutions and this by extension would explain why the bilinguals tend to be good in math. Other than that they are also very good at detecting grammatical and syntactical errors as well as the words within the continuous speech. When it come to the reading tests, the bilinguals are far much better in this field as compared to the monolinguals. Even when texts are littered with different words from other languages, the bilinguals tend to tell the difference much faster as they read through, while the monolinguals are much slower, with stops at the words that they do not recognize. As such, the bilinguals are not good at the spoken languages but also will easily beat the monolinguals in reading contests in their native language.
The metalinguistic awareness that the bilinguals possess greatly contributes to their ability to master two languages and an added cognitive advantage (Callan, 2008). Their language development comes on much earlier in life than the monolingual counterparts. According to research by one Bialystok, there are two of the most distinctive processing types which give the bilinguals a helping hand as they develop their language skills. They have the ability to understand and represent the abstract information that they get as well as the control which basically allows them to distinctively select the structure aspects that they want to deal with ignoring the information that they feel is not relevant at the time (Nicolet, 2012). The cognitive abilities that the bilinguals have are connected to the ability to control and sift through the information that they need and what they deem irrelevant, giving them the advantage over the monolinguals.
Using the stroop test, the bilinguals show much prowess in their ability to tell apart between colors, while the monolinguals take much longer to identify the colors in the test. If the bilinguals are shown the word ‘RED’ but it is represented by a different color (mismatched color and name) (HYPERLINK "http://blogs.redorbit.com/author/connie/" \t "_blank"Connie, 2013). If they are required to identify that color by saying out loud, the bilinguals will produce the correct response much faster, while the bilinguals a fraction of time much longer to respond. In their learning process the bilinguals are able to inhibit the previous associations while at ease of forming new representation in their minds as new stimuli present itself in the learning environment. Due to the fact that the bilinguals use more languages than one, and in most cases from different cultures, it means that they have knowledge of the other culture (Sakakihara, 2011). As such, they easily identify with other cultures than most of the monolinguals would generally. It therefore gives them a better and grounded personal identity.
The relativity in their linguistic powers also means that they see the world from a different perspective than the monolinguals. Their views of the world in general are much broader and socially tend to be more open-minded with higher initiative (Rimm, 2009). Some few of the research that have been conducted on the bilingual child’s personality suggest that the child may also develop multiple personalities depending on the language that they are speaking at any one given time (CBCnews, 2012). The bilingualism provides the children with executive functions that help them to learn and develop their language skills, such as the aforementioned attention control, mental flexibility, controlling inhibitors and switching between tasks.
Disadvantages of bilingualism on children language development
Other researchers suggest that the bilingual children have some disadvantages to cope with as they learn and develop their language skills. One of the most commonly debated limitations of the bilingual children is their delays in the lexical acquisition. This mostly is associated with the children that have not mastered the art of retrieving the right word from the specific language in their brain. If they are leaning English for example after a native language like the Chinese, their English is bound to be a little husky , since they tend to confuse the words in the two languages (Bhattacharjee, 2012). This is, howe...