Do Infants Only Learn "One" Language Well? (2)

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Do Infants Only Learn "One" Language Well? (2)
Do Bilingual Children Develop Their “Intelligence” Less?

The myths arise from a combination of factors. Since language is important culturally and politically, these considerations colour numerous arguments, including brain research findings, to favour one “Official” language to the detriment of others.




Certain medical observations have played their part: cases of bi- or multilingual patients completely forgetting one language and not at all another after a head trauma helped foster the idea that languages occupied separate areas in the brain.



Studies conducted at the beginning of the 20th century, which found that bilingual individuals had inferior “intelligence”, were carried out with faulty methodologies, being based mainly on migrant children who were often undernourished and in difficult cultural and social conditions.

The protocols should have taken into account that many of these children had started learning the language of their host country around the age of 5, 6, or later, and, without a strong command of that language, they had problems learning other subjects. In short, we cannot meaningfully compare the intelligence of monolingual children from native, often well-off families with that of multilingual children from primarily underprivileged environments with limited family knowledge of the dominant language.

"Understanding the Brain", The Birth of a Learning Science, 2007, page 118

Do Infants Only Learn "One" Language Well? (1)

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Do Infants Only Learn "One" Language Well? (1)

Can A Young Child’s Brain Only Manage to Learn One Language at a Time?

Today, half the world population speaks at least two languages and multilingualism is generally considered an asset. Yet for long, many have believed that learning a new language is problematic for the native language.

Superstitions on this die hard and are often based on the false representation of language in the brain. One myth is that the more one learns a new language, the more one necessarily loses the other.

Another myth imagines two languages as occupying separate areas in the brain without contact points such that knowledge acquired in one language cannot be transferred to the other.




From these ideas, it has been supposed that the simultaneous learning of two languages during infancy would create a mixture of the two languages in the brain and slow down the development of the child. The false inference is that the native language had to be learned “correctly” before beginning another one.

"Understanding the Brain", The Birth of a Learning Science, 2007, page 118