Simultaneous Acquisition of Two Languages

SimulSimultaneous Acquisition of Two Languages

Simultaneous acquisition of two languages has been viewed quite apprehensively in the past. It was thought to result in delayed, incomplete or even impaired language. Some earlier studies reveled just these kinds of statistics. Streets found that bilingual children in Wales we not only confused but scored relatively lower than monolingual children on IQ tests.

But views began to change in starting in the 1960’s. These studies refuted earlier studies since the earlier studies depended largely on L2 learners who differed in many factors other than just knowing a second language, making the results unfair and invalid. Studies conducted in the 1960’s and after took into account that the children in both the control and experimental groups needed to be from the same socio-economic class in order to accurately compare the two.

Ben-Zeev (1977) found that there was a cognitive advantage for L2 students. She found participants from similar SES backgrounds and discovered that in spite of being at a lower vocabulary level in the beginning, bilinguals showed more advanced processing of verbal material. The bilingual children showed they were stronger in comparison to monolingual students in terms of the readiness to impute and recognize structures. The bilingual children displayed greater word awareness than their monolingual counterparts. These results were replicated across similar studies.

Bialystok (1986) compared the performances of English speaking and French-English bilingual first graders with the task of sentence segmentation and word judgments. The bilingual children consistently outperformed the monolingual children. The tasks involved the children manipulating their knowledge of words rather than demonstrating the extent of that knowledge.

Turner (1989) compared English speaking first graders. The first group consisted of students who were specifically English speaking only. The second consisted of...