Re: second language acquisition in 2 1/2-year-old
From: Athel Cornish-Bowden (athel_at_ibsm.cnrs-mrs.fr)
Date: 11/08/04
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Date: 8 Nov 2004 08:27:11 -0800
Marc Adler <marc.adler@gmail.com> wrote in message news:<WaEid.34612$hN1.20069@twister.socal.rr.com>...
> My daughter is 2 1/2 years old and speaks only Japanese, as my wife and
> I only speak Japanese at home and all my daughter's friends are children
> of Japanese people living here in Hawaii.
>
> We've just put our daughter in pre-school here (a regular, all-English
> preschool), and were wondering how long it would take for her English to
> reach the level of her Japanese.
>
> Are there any statistics on this kind of thing? ...
I can't give any statistics, just describe my experience with my
daughter, who is now 21 and has been trilingual (English, Spanish,
French), speaking all three languages at or beyond the level for her
age, since the age of 4. I am a native English speaker and when my
daughter was born I had distant memories of school French, and almost
no Spanish. My wife is a native Spanish speaker, who spoke English
fluently when our daughter was born, and her French was at about the
same level as mine.
Our daughter was born in England and, apart from eight weeks in Chile
and Colombia at the age of 12 months the only conversations she heard
until she was 2 1/2 were in English. However, my wife always spoke to
her in Spanish (and still does). At about the time when she was
starting to speak (English) she went for 15 months to Chile, and when
she returned to England she was able to speak Spanish but although she
could understand English she didn't speak it. In the space of about
two weeks she switched from speaking only Spanish to speaking only
English. During the next three months she started using both (but
never getting them confused). Then we moved to live in France. During
the trip (aged 3 1/2) she made it clear that she understood that
English was "my" language whereas Spanish was my wife's: she said
something to my wife in Spanish, and then immediately repeated the
same thing to me in English.
Not long after arriving in France she started going to a school where
she heard only French (school starts very young in France). For about
six months she never said anything at home in French, but once she
started it became clear that her French was normal for her age.
During this early period I sometimes worried whether she would be
confused, but she never showed any signs of being confused, and never
mixed the languages. Occasionally (after her French had advanced a
long way) she used French words in English sentences, but you could
always hear the quotation marks, i.e. there was never any doubt that
she knew perfectly well that the word was French and was just using it
because she didn't know the English equivalent.
The only obvious effect of French on her English or Spanish was a
tendency to choose the English or Spanish word that most closely
resembled the French, so she would say "utilize" in English rather
than the more common "use", and "utilisar" in Spanish rather than the
more common "usar". In junior school her French was not only up to the
level of the other children, but, as judged from the school's grades,
was much better.
So, although I would hesitate to generalize from a single example, I
can only say that the effect of growing up in a mixed-language
environment has been wholly beneficial for my daughter's language
development.
athel
--
Athel Cornish-Bowden
athel@ibsm.cnrs-mrs.fr
http://bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/homepage.htm
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