Prof proves bilingual children suffer no setbacks
July 17, 2001 - Dr. Johanne Paradis remembers hearing a story about a diabetic Montreal woman who fell into a coma at home. The woman’s bilingual two-year-old daughter dialed 911 and said, "mama malade," and the ambulance arrived to take care of the situation. The mother said afterwards her biggest worry was that her daughter would be slow to talk or ask for help because she was bilingual.
“This is something we hear all the time--that parents are often worried about raising their kids bilingually because the kids will face some sort of an impairment,” said Paradis, a professor in the University of Alberta’s Department of Linguistics. “But there is no evidence to suggest that is the case.”
Paradis studies whether or not there are any drawbacks for children to learn two languages simultaneously. Particularly, she studies children with specific language impairment (SLI) and has found that children with SLI have no more difficulty learning two languages than learning one.
SLI is a lifelong disorder that affects about five to seven per cent of the general population. It affects boys four times more than it does girls, and there is a correlation between SLI and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. People with SLI make mistakes in grammar, vocabulary and syntax in conversation, but intervention can bring kids up to normal speed, said Paradis.
“For example, a person with SLI might say, ‘I going,’ rather than ‘I am going,’ or they may leave off the ‘ed’ in the past tense of a verb,” she said.
Her research looked at children with SLI between the ages of six and seven who speak French and English simultaneously at home from birth. She compared that group to monolingual kids in each language and found that kids with SLI who speak only one language make the same degree and number of mistakes as those who speak both languages.
“When parents go to speech pathologists and clinicians because of an impairment, one of the first things they’re told is to stop speaking two languages because that’s what is hurting them,” said Paradis, who has presented her findings to clinicians. “The folk wisdom from clinicians is that learning two languages makes impairment worse and that’s not true. There is no reason to give that kind of advice--it doesn’t hurt a child to learn two languages at the same time.”
Paradis is also studying the differences between children who learn a second language at school and children with SLI of the same age.
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The U of A Department of Linguistics Web site: http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~linguist/
