At nine months and a few days, it is still too early to look for bilingual expression, obviously. But what about bilingual comprehension? Last week, our little girl started waving “goodbye” to me when I left her at the nanny’s. The first time it was the situation that prompted her action, or at least that’s […]

There is a lot of writing about linguistic interference in bilingual(-to-be) children, but it also occurs in parents. The other day, another German mom told me she got lost on the way to meeting me. We spoke German, obviously, and she said she had “sich verloren”. In French, the correct term is “se perdre”, literally […]

  …”ba-ba”. Listen to her here. This time I didn’t even look for German words starting with “ba-” since daddy just gave me “-teau” again. Now it won’t be long before she calls him “pa-pa” (“daddy” in both our languages). Sadly, the “m” sound is trickier 🙁

The other day, through a discussion on a networking site, I came across this: Speaking in tongues A mother in Lebanon tells of her children mixing three languages (English, French and Arabic) in a very peculiar way that has her and her husband scratching their heads. I’d be curious to know what has become of those kids […]

Does “gaga” count as a word? If so, our baby girl has started speaking. Listen to her! I tried to think of German words beginning with “ga-” that she might have been attempting to say. Here is what I came up with: Gartenschlauch Garage Garnitur Garmisch-Partenkirchen   Then I asked Daddy which French words began […]

Über eine Nachricht in einem Netzwerk kam ich zu diesem Post des Blogs “SprachenNetz”: Wie lernen Kleinkinder Fremdsprachen? Der Artikel beschreibt einen ähnlichen Versuch wie den, an dem wir teilgenommen haben: Im Forschungslabor „WortSchatzinsel“ am Georg-Elias-Müller Institut für Psychologie sehen die Kinder während des Versuchs auf einem großen Bildschirm Bilder und kurze Filme, gleichzeitig werden […]

The research student of the LSCP (see my post from Dec. 18, 2010) gave me the link to an article about research on cognitive abilities in seven-month-old infants, a study that compared monolingual and bilingual babies: Cognitive gains in seven-month-old bilingual infants In a nutshell, the article describes a series of experiments that had monolingual and […]

As a postscriptum to my post of almost a year ago (Jan. 4, 2010), here is another article on newborn babies crying differently according to their mother tongue – or at least the language they heard while in their mother’s womb: BBC article This article on the BBC wesite contains a sound sample where the […]

A few weeks ago, we received a letter from the “Laboratoire des Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistiques” asking if we would let our baby participate in a study about language acquisition. They were looking for babies between 4½ and 5½ months. Last Saturday morning we entered a cramped room on the basement level of my maternity […]

I’m used to being the designated interpreter whenver we’re around my family or my old friends, few of whom speak French. Whether my dad comes visiting, or we stay for Christmas at my mom’s, I’m always glad when I make it through the days without mixing up languages. I don’t mean mixing them up in […]