As Byers-Heinlein and Lew-Williams(2013) expressed that many children in North America and around the world grow up exposed to two languages from an early age. Parents of bilingual infants and toddlers have important questions about the costs and benefits of early bilingualism, and how to best support language acquisition in their children. (p.95). Also, according to Laka, he proposed that What difference does it make to have one language in the brain or to have more than one? This is an intriguing and currently much inquired question, which can help us unravel more than one mystery concerning language and the brain. At present, we only know bits and pieces of the answer.(p.1)
All children learn at least one language.…show more content… This is known as code mixing. In fact, code mixing is a normal part of bilingual development, and bilingual children actually have good reasons to code mix (Pearson, 2008). One reason some children code mix is that it happens frequently in their language communities—children are just doing what they hear adults around them do (Comeau, Genesee, &Lapaquette, 2003). A second reason is that, just like young monolinguals, young bilinguals are sometimes limited in their linguistic resources. Similarly to how a monolingual 1-year-old might initially use the word “dog” to refer to any four-legged creature, bilingual children also use their limited vocabularies resourcefully. If a bilingual child does not know or cannot quickly retrieve the appropriate word in one language, she might borrow the word from the other language (Lanza, 2004). Rather than being a sign of confusion, code mixing can be seen as a path of least resistance: a sign of bilingual children’s ingenuity. Further, bilingual children do not seem to use their two languages haphazardly.…show more content… Researchers have argued that biological change during the first two decades of life results in a reduced capacity for learning and retaining the subtleties of language (Johnson & Newport, 1989; Weber-Fox & Neville, 2001). In other words, our brains may be more receptive to language earlier in life. But importantly, our environment is also more conducive to language learning earlier in life. In many cultures and in many families, young children experience a very rich language environment during the first years of life. They hear language in attention-grabbing, digestible bundles that are targeted skillfully at their developmental level (Fernald & Simon, 1984). Caregivers typically speak in ways that are neither too simple nor too complex, and children receive hours and hours of practice with language every day. This high-quality and high-quantity experience with language—a special feature of how people communicate with young children—often results in successful language learning. It gives children rich, diverse, and engaging opportunities to learn about the sounds, syllables, words, phrases, and sentences that comprise their native language. (p102-103)
Conclusion:
It is clear that the natural bilingualism is so benefit in the early stages of language acquisition. It will enrich the leaners with linguistic abilities when dealing with
