Being A Bilingual Child Essay

Before addressing the topic at hand, there needs to be an understanding of more broad topics and questions. These topics include what bilingualism is, the difference between being fluent and bilingual, and factors which could lead to a child becoming bilingual. Most believe that someone who is bilingual merely speaks two languages, but that is not very specific. What does being bilingual even mean? Some sources say it is someone who is fluent in two languages, but being fluent is not specific either. There is a difference between being bilingual and being fluent in another language. Webster's Dictionary states that being fluent is being able to speak or write a particular foreign language easily and accurately. One can be fluent in a language, but this definition does not translate well when relating to someone who is multilingual. Aneta Pavelnko, a Temple University researcher, found that when analyzing children who were Russian-English bilingual, in Russian, the bilingual children called a cup a "chashka", rather than native Russian children would refer to it as a "stakan" which translated to glass (Francois Grosjean Ph.D.). Francois Grosjean, Ph.D. stated that when studying English-French

Psycholinguistics is the study of the relationships between linguistic, or language, behavior, and psychological processes. Diane Poulin-Dubois stated that “children are exposed to their languages in different environments so they may encounter specific items in a context where only one language is used. This decreases the number of words the children learn in each language”(Francois Grosjean Ph.D.). When comparing the full vocabulary count of these children (taking into account both languages) it was not different to the vocabulary of the monolinguals, but when looking at a single language, their vocabulary was smaller in the bilinguals than in the monolinguals (Francois Grosjean