Episode 01: Bilingualism & Language Development: Interview with Professor Monika Molnar
We often get asked about whether bilingual children are at risk of language delay. So we asked Dr. Monika Molnar, a professor at University of Toronto’s Speech-language pathology department to answer your questions:
Does speaking more than one language cause language delay?
The short answer is No! Speaking more than one language to your child does not put them at risk of speech and language delay. In fact, the opposite is true. Bilingual or trilingual children develop the ability to switch contexts very quickly which prepares them for learning new skills.
Learning two languages from birth takes the same amount of effort. However bilinguals use more resources such as contextual cues to know which language they should use.
Bilingual children and monolingual children reach their language milestones around the same time. There’s no evidence to suggest that bilingual children are delayed in their milestones.
There’s no evidence to suggest bilingual children have a cognitive advantage. However speaking more than one language is an advantage by itself and should be encouraged by families.
It takes the brain 200ms (One-fifth of a second) to recognize a familiar face and know which language to use.
Children that are raised in different language environments may produce different consonant and vowel sounds. For example, english speaking babies may use consonants in the beginning of their babbling, where Japanese babies may begin their babbling with vowels.
Onset of babbling (the time babies begin to babble) is similar across languages. In other words, children from different language backgrounds, start to babble at 3-6months and follow the same pattern of babbling in terms of consonant-vowel structure.
About Dr. Molnar
Dr. Molnar received her Ph.D. from the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at McGill University. Her doctoral dissertation focused on the neural and behavioral correlates of monolingual and bilingual speech processing. Previous to joining the Department of Speech-Language Pathology at the University of Toronto, she completed her postdoctoral training at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, & Language (BCBL) in Spain. Dr. Molnar’s teaching and current research interests focus on infants and young children with multilingual, bilingual, and monolingual backgrounds, including typically developing populations and populations at (familial) risk of language disorders.