The Language Development of Toddlers in Immigrant Families

Many, if not most, of the world’s children grow up exposed to two or more languages. In order to identify those bilingually-developing children who are late talkers, it is necessary to know the normal time course of bilingual development. Using the MacArthur inventories, we assessed the early English and Spanish language development of children in the U.S. who were exposed to both languages from birth, and we compared the bilingual children’s development of English to the English language development of a group of monolingual English learning children from similar socioeconomic backgrounds. We found that the rate at which the bilingual children developed vocabulary knowledge was virtually identical to the rate of vocabulary learning in monolingual children when the bilingual children’s combined English and Spanish vocabularies were counted. However, when comparison was made of the bilingual children’s English vocabulary to the monolingual children’s English vocabulary, the bilingual children took significantly longer to achieve the same vocabulary size. The bilingual children also reached the milestone of producing word combinations at a later age than the monolingual children. This finding, that it takes longer to learn two language than one—even for young children, suggests that identification of late talkers among bilingual children requires an assessment procedure that takes into account the children’s knowledge in both their languages.