Bilingualism research is flourishing  - it's time to start listening

CILT Information Officer for Early Language Learning, Ruth Churchill reports from the International Association for the Study of Child Language 11th Annual Congress...

In the summer break I had the privilege of attending the 11^th annual congress of the International Association for the Study of Child Language.

This year’s conference, held in Edinburgh, brought together some of the most distinguished researchers in linguistics and child language acquisition to present, and debate, their latest work.

Appropriately for an event which coincided with the Edinburgh International Festival, delegates attended from all over the world. Topics of discussion included developing grammar, vocabulary and literacy, early gestures and non-verbal communication, sign language and Autistic Spectrum Disorders, to name but a few. Each topic was explored with thought-provoking insight and demonstrated the inspirational levels of commitment and energy behind the research.

During the week, I attended several sessions on early bilingualism. Despite being a relatively new discipline, research in this field is flourishing.

Traditionally, developmental milestones for child language have been outlined in terms of monolingual norms. However, most of the world’s people grow up speaking more than one language. Researchers are now increasingly motivated to address this discrepancy and are working to describe child development in a way that better represents the diverse language backgrounds which many of you encounter in your primary classrooms. 

One esteemed researcher doing just this is Professor Núria Sebastián-Gallés. Sebastián-Gallés specialises in how children learn the sounds of a language and with her plenary, ‘opening your ears in a multilingual world’, she captured the current vitality of early bilingualism research.  

To the ear, sentences often seem like one continuous stream of sound. However, they are actually formed from many individual sounds (phonemes) strung together. Not all possible phonemes are found in every language. Rather, each language uses a limited selection. For example, Spanish uses a soft r sound in words like perro [dog] which is not found in English, its nearest sound pair being ‘r’. Monolingual children must figure out which sounds their language uses. For bilingual children, this task is additionally complex – they must realise that at least two separate languages are being spoken around them. These languages may share some phonemes but not all.

Thanks to specially developed techniques, a significant body of research now exists to show that even newborns can discriminate pairs of phonemes from different languages at birth. However, the results depend on the two languages tested: babies are able to distinguish English and Japanese phoneme pairs but perform inconsistently with more similar sounding pairs from closely related languages such as Italian and Spanish. This finding has consequences for phonological development as bilingual babies’ initial sensitivity to sound contrasts will vary according to which particular combination of languages they are learning.

Sebastián-Gallés presented an intriguing comparison of Spanish-Catalan bilingual and monolingual babies. Over the course of a year, these babies were tested on their ability to differentiate pairs of Spanish and Catalan phonemes. The two groups displayed different developmental patterns: at 4 months old, both monolingual and bilingual babies ably distinguished Spanish and Catalan sounds.

But at 8 months, only the monolinguals retained this ability. The 8 month old bilinguals behaved as if they could no longer detect any difference. Strikingly, by 12 months both groups were able to distinguish the phonemes once more. In other words, whilst the monolingual performance was constant, the bilinguals appeared to lose their initial sensitivity and then regain it!

Sebastián-Gallés offered a unique account of this mystery, presenting what initially appears to be some kind of relative developmental delay in terms of a neat adaptive strategy.

Her account emphasised the importance of keeping in mind children’s diverse language environments: Growing up in multilingual surroundings, bilingual babies inevitably encounter more linguistic variety than monolinguals. Sebastián-Gallés proposed that by 8 months old, the bilingual babies had grown so accustomed to phonemic variety in their two ambient languages, hearing the minor difference between Spanish and Catalan no longer induced the expected ‘surprise!’ reaction that babies typically display in these kinds of experiments.

Put simply, the bilingual babies could still perceive the difference between the Spanish and Catalan phoneme pairs at 8 months, it just didn’t interest them enough to respond! In contrast, the monolingual babies were equally surprised by difference in sound at 4 and 8 months – phonemic variation was a novel experience for them, raised with mainly one language.

So why did the bilinguals resume an interest in the phonemic differences between Spanish and Catalan at 12 months? Sebastián-Gallés suggested a link to word learning which begins around this time. In order to identify new words with distinct meanings, it is important to focus on phonemic differences. For example, being able to tell a ‘b’ from a ‘d’ is crucial for knowing big and dig.

According to this interpretation, the 12 month old bilingual babies attended to the subtle differences between the Spanish and Catalan phonemes because distinguishing them is essential to building a full vocabulary in both languages. This example demonstrates young babies adjusting their behaviour to suit their environment and language learning needs.

For me this conclusion did more than just explain the mystery around acquiring Spanish-Catalan sound contrasts, it prompted me to evaluate my approach to studying child language. Monolingual and bilingual development is not something that can be captured by simply comparing their relative advantages and disadvantages. In order to fully understand the wide range of language behaviours that children display, it is vital to consider early linguistic experiences and their potential to shape future learning and communication.

Being involved in a quickly advancing and truly interdisciplinary field, you cannot help but be inspired. Needless to say, the conference left me with revived enthusiasm and raring to support your primary languages work, building a community of young learners where the sounds of a multilingual world play loud and clear.