Iran (IMNA) - What procedures allow a kid to totally grasp its native language in just a few years, and to a level of proficiency that adult second-language learners can virtually never match?
If it's astonishing that a young child can acquire a single language, how can we justify that it can learn two, three, or more?
This question assumes that bilingualism or multilingualism is infrequent in human cultures, rather than the norm. However, researchers believe that about half of the world's population is bilingual, and that multilingualism is more frequent than monolingualism. Take a look at some of the world's most populated countries, including India and China.
That a child might speak more than one native language is therefore not unexpected. As opposed to being discouraged as if it were a barrier to the child's growth or social and cultural integration, this is something that need to be promoted. Research has shown that bilingualism has several lifelong social and cognitive advantages. These could include improved cognition, a later diagnosis of neurodegenerative illnesses, or enhanced social context adaption.
The foundation of bilingualism in children appears to be twofold: first, a child's remarkable brain plasticity, especially between the ages of 0 and 3, and second, a set of general cognitive talents that apply to humans of all ages, such as abstraction, analogy, and encyclopedic memory.
A newborn has the capacity to remember and classify language stimuli that include a wealth of information regarding sound, structure, meaning, and the social and familial settings in which they are employed. This knowledge allows a kid, especially after the first year, to swiftly deduce that one set of linguistic constructs differs from another in terms of rules for two distinct languages (for example, Farsi and English).
They gain the ability to effortlessly transition between languages, for example, based on who they are speaking to, and occasionally even within a single sentence, a talent known as "code-switching" (also called "code-mixing").
Give the child some time
Naturally, a child's ease of bilingualism does not imply that their language development is the same as that of a monolingual person. Whether kids are learning two languages at the same time or starting a second language before turning three, there is an extra cognitive burden involved in teaching them two different grammars for certain social situations. It is not unusual for a bilingual child to acquire their shared language slightly more slowly than a monolingual child. As the child gets older, this small difference—which occasionally shows up as linguistic "mixtures"—quickly goes away.
The "one person, one language" parenting approach is frequently mentioned as a means of assisting children in becoming multilingual and providing them with additional guidance. A newborn will learn to discriminate between the two language systems more rapidly and be able to utilize them when interacting with particular individuals, such as Anglophones and Farsi speakers, if one parent speaks to the infant more in English and the other more in Farsi.
Additionally, if both languages are spoken in moderation at home, the child will be likely to effectively develop them for frequent usage in the future. Thus, there are certain habits you may form if you're a bilingual parent and you want to pass on your language skills to your child. Other than that, you shouldn't worry too much—all you need to do is speak to your child in both languages on a regular basis, and they'll handle of the rest.
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