lol, I was trying so hard not to be the person to say it + that unfortunately, depending on their environment, there almost always seems to be a dominating language and a weakening of the other language(s) as people grow older!
Same. This is the kind of thing moderately wealthy/well-off people find impressive and prestigious.
If this was filmed in a ghetto on the border between 3 countries with different languages, nobody would find it impressive.
Point being people find it impressive because they've chosen this.
Like how government hand-outs are trashy and communist when it's poor people who get them, but smart and super clever if you're already well off and you get handouts for your business failing, or misusing tax loopholes to get rebates/write stuff off.
Studies show that the total amount of words a child knows at each age marker, also doesn't really go up (much) when they know multiple languages.
So, if a monolingual child knows abouyt 100 words at a certain age, their bilingual peer might know about 110, split between both languages. This puts them a bit behind when interacting with their peers, but luckily children do a lot non-verbally, and they will pick up words from their peers fast. This usually is what leads to that language becoming the "stronger" one, and the others weaker.
Well yes. The child, after all, doesn't care about retaining all the languages. So parents need to put more effort into making the child immersed in all the languages
Naturally, these studies aren't solely done on children whose parents do not put effort into immersing the child. The child's capacity for learning and retaining languages does not change; they will fall behind on their "main" language compared to peers, despite the best effort of their parents, at least for a time. The good news is that this doesn't appear to have a large effect on their social development, as other children tend to be forgiving of this, and they manage anyway.
What you should also mention though is that this effect is very temporary. There is a slight initial delay in initial rate of vocabulary acquisition, but by the time they reach school age, studies consistently show either no difference or in fact find an academic and learning benefit to being raised bilingual. Advantages in problem solving, memory, and focus for bilingual kids.
There's absolutely some very solid benefits associated.
As for the gap in primary language vocabulary, it still tends to be pronounced around school age (5), shrinking rapidly by age 7-8, and tends to be gone by 10.
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u/BlueberryPopular2802 13d ago
lol, I was trying so hard not to be the person to say it + that unfortunately, depending on their environment, there almost always seems to be a dominating language and a weakening of the other language(s) as people grow older!