Expats Since Birth: Bilingual Siblings and Their Language Preferences, Expats Since Birth
You can’t choose whether your child will like Mozart or Madonna – and you can’t choose which language your child will prefer to speak. Each child develops his or her own preference for language at his or her own pace. And in a family of multi-lingual siblings, children will make choices. Parents can choose to support that process.
For example, Uta is a multi-lingual parent of multi-lingual children living in the Netherlands. She recently wrote about an experience with her toddler who refused to speak Italian as a reaction to moving to the Netherlands.
“In my experience, you sometimes have to adapt your language situation within your family to the individual needs of your children,” Uta wrote on her blog, Expats Since Birth.
Uta shared some support she’s received on the topic in a book, Bilingual Siblings: Language Use in Families by Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert.
In Defense of the Bilingual Child, On Raising Bilingual Children
If you’re in the process of raising a bilingual child, you might discover a range of reactions from loved ones, educators, even friends. Research continues to support the long-term benefits of a bilingual education for children, showing improved brain functions, problem-solving skills, and language acquisition. Regardless, it’s still a new concept for many people. This blog post helps parents be prepared for some of those surprised reactions.
The Psycholinguistics of Bilingualism, Psychology Today
As interest grows in bilingual research studies, new areas of interest are being discovered, such as the Psycholinguistics of Bilingualism. In Psychology Today, psychoanalytics professor Francois Grosjean, Ph.D. talks about a new book on the topic. Grosjean and co-author Professor Ping Li explore how many languages might be involved in the language process of listening or talking; how learning a second language might actually affect behavior; and what happens when a word is literally “lost in translation.”